J. Nathan Matias

@natematias

I work with communities on citizen science for safer, fairer digital environments. Founder: Citizens & Technology Lab. Assoc Prof, Communication, Cornell · Guatemalan-American · Ultracyclist 🐘@natematias@social.coop natematias.com citizensandtech.org

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J. Nathan Matias@natematias· 23d

Imagine being investigated for "un-American" activities and labeled a communist because you made a machine to find out which toothbrush was the best value for money. That's what happened to Consumer Reports in the 1940s and 1950s when it was blacklisted. blogs.library.duke.edu/magazine/202...

A machine developed by scientists at Consumer Reports moves a toothbrush back and forth over false teeth (date unknown) to test the reliability of the toothbrush.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· 25d

Want access to expensive subscription archives of academic papers and other paywalled online material? People often ask me as an academic to share access with them, but there's a better way: active @wikipedia.org editors can get The Wikipedia Library for free! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Screenshot: "The Wikipedia Library" - More than 100 of the world's top subscription-only databases, with content in 32 languages, free for Wikipedians of all backgrounds

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Jul 13

Grateful to New England Randonneurs for a great ride this weekend from the Boston area through New Hampshire, across the White Mountains on 112, over to Portland & back. While riding, I listened to "The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles" by @older.bsky.social, the perfect theme for a 600km ride!

A red bicycle rests outside of the Early Bird Cafe in South Berwick Maine. In the window are plants, and floating white globes, and outside is a sun-bleached wooden bench.

The jagged line of the green, tree-covered White Mountains on the horizon interrupt a pale blue sky dotted with white clouds on the view from near the top of the Kancamagus Pass, with green and mustard colored brush and trees in the foreground.

An American flay flies next to white flowers in a series of windowboxes along a bridge that crosses a dam in New Hamphsire, with a mountain range in the background.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Jul 9

Grateful to have arrived in Boston to set up my new apartment for the year after stopping by Lanesborough for breakfast with @ethanz.bsky.social and a ride up Mount Greylock Time to unpack boxes and get set up!

An orange salamander with cute eyes moves across the road on Mount Graylock

Dingies with red sails race on the gray Charles River in Boston

Flowing green hills and fences with tree-lined mountains beneath Mount Greylock in the Taconic Mountains.

A red folding bicycle is propped against a log fence next to a conifer with a backdrop of blue skies and fleecy clouds on the way up to the top of Mount Greylock in the Taconic Mountains.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Jul 4

Spent the morning of the fourth contributing to my community by repairing the road signs along our lane. Grateful for the chance to share a level of reciprocity with my neighbors that few get to enjoy.

A blue ladder next to a crosswalk and 10mph sign against a blue sky

A snail moves across a walking path with grey stones and greenery in the backdrop.

Green bushes, trees, and grass against a blue sky, with a sigh that says "Area of Restorative Kindness"

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Jul 2

Here's a photo of a 17th century bread shelf on display at St. Martin Ludgate in London. It's not a modern food bank in any way, but it *is* a precursor to today's mutual aid programs. I took the photo for a unit I teach at Cornell on the design, economics, and psychology of mutual aid systems.

17th century bread shelf, from the church of St. Mary Magdalen, Old Fish Street. On display at St. Martin Ludgate Church in August 2024. The shelf is a beautiful wooden shelf with spaces that can hold large loaves of bread. Donors would leave the bread in the shelf, where others could take it as needed to feed their families. Now the shelf holds hymnals and embroidered cloth used by the church.

The altar of St Martin in Ludgate, with a beautiful dark wood paneled backdrop displaying extended writings and elaborate scrollwork, and an olive and maroon altar cloth out front.

A picture from the Mutual Aid Tompkins Food Sharing Cabinets, where people leave shelf stable food for neighbors to access anonymously as they need it.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Jul 2

Williams outlines the impact that media campaigns for international aid can have on domestic issues & politics. When charities organize public humanitarian appears to support people outside a country, it creates pathways for domestic institutions to use the same media scripts, for better and worse.

Quote: "These campaigns arguably left an imprint on the ethical imagination, so much so that organisations running food drives in the 2000s were not only able to draw on their memory to legitimate their own appeals, but to generate widespread public support galvanised by the "shock" that food donations were needed for families in the UK rather than abroad.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Jul 1

My teenage self would have been thrilled to know it would be possible to have days like today: - Discussing the role of scientific evidence in civil liberties cases with @gshans.bsky.social - Catching up on planetary gear repair with @elplatt.com - Testing my new commuter bicycle

A Bike Friday Silk folding bike with 20 inch wheels, painted black, with a belt drive, red pedals, dark red handlebar tape, and a silver metal water bottle stands on a grassy hill beneath deep gray cumulous clouds that part to make room for a fiery orange sunset.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Jun 27

Finally finding a moment to pause in a busy year to reflect and rest for a moment, while reading @hannareichel.bsky.social’s “For Such A Time as This: An Emergency Devotional“

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Jun 6

Remembering when this trash can was one canvas for a participatory, interactive novel by @docmofo.bsky.social & @srettberg.bsky.social nickm.com/collab/montf...

A shiny steel trash can in the foreground against the marble floor of Philadelphia’s 30th street station, with a bright blue train schedule behind, surrounded by art deco chandeliers and a vaulted ceiling.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· May 27

First, I finished Veronica Chapa's moving debut novel "Malinalli," which is a fictionalized magical realism account of the life of Malintzin, the enslaved woman who served as an interpreter and intermediary for Cortés during the conquest of the Aztec Empire www.simonandschuster.com/books/Malina...

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· May 14

Our collective faith in each others' creativity cannot be cultivated alone. Last weekend in-between apartment-hunting, I bicycled from Boston to Providence, imagining the journey taken by Roger Williams in the winter of 1636. And I thought of the indigenous peoples who sheltered & protected him.

bicycle handlebars are shown in this point-of-view picture of someone bicycling on a crushed gravel path through a young growth forest in Rhode Island.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· May 4

Great to see our book "Auditing AI" out in the Penn bookstore next to so many other great works. Also, my wonderful co-author @elleryrb.bsky.social & I just HAD to celebrate by inspecting this very important automated system at a Philadelphia farmer's market. mitpress.mit.edu/978026205172...

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Apr 27

Are you a leader trying to figure out how to evaluate an AI system? Are you in business, journalism, civil society, or the tech industry? I'm excited to share the publication of the book I wish I had in my first job testing AI seventeen years ago: "Auditing AI." mitpress.mit.edu/978026205172...

J. Nathan Matias, with a book entitled "Auditing AI" in front of the Big Red Barn at Cornell University.

A picture of the book "Auditing AI" in front of the ice cream machines at Cornell University's Dairy Bar.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Apr 23

The most interesting finding from our survey with @askhistorians.bsky.social is a relationship between someone's belonging and a sense of AI use. The more someone thinks AI is being used, the lower they rank their sense of belonging. This may help explain how AI contributes to community collapse.

Finally, we were interested in the relationship between AI use and perceptions of community culture, like affective commitment and information quality. So again, we ran a regression analysis and, as above, are summarizing the results below. Positive and negative results are statistically significant, neutral are not. Because we’re doing statistical tests, these could only reliably be run with data collected from the random sample. The first table reports on community attachment and the second on information quality.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Apr 23

Quality matters to AskHistorians readers. It also matters a *lot* to the historians who answer those questions and who moderate. So the subreddit has banned AI. That's for good reason: We found that the more someone thinks AI is being used, the lower they rate the community on information quality.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Apr 22

On a related note, I think the idea of knowledge as relational & multigenerational is what I love most about Wikipedia's Baby Globe mascot. It demonstrates how Wikipedia isn't primarily information- it's care for each other and for the world, over time. wikimediafoundation.org/wikipedia25/...

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Apr 17

CONGRATULATIONS to DR. @lucas-wright.bsky.social for defending his PhD on the political economy of trust & safety, disinformation, and copyright! Lucas's talk asked: when gov regulates tech, who decides the meaning of policy and how policy affects people's lives? His answer: compliance vendors

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Apr 9

Last week, I rode out to the Hudson River and stopped by the boyhood home of W. E. B. Du Bois in Great Barrington MA. It was a beautifully-peaceful place, and I'm so glad I took the time to pause and reflect.

A wooden bridge spans over a creek that reflects the color of a blue sky, with sunlight casting shadows and light throughout the interior of the bridge

A sign reads "Grass Roots Democracy" and includes a collection of photos from the life of W. E. B. Du Bois, to a backdrop of pine trees.

A mossy path passes through a collection of pine trees on the walk through the land near W. E. B. Du Bois's boyhood home.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Mar 29

Ok enough social media for today- it’s time to head home from NYC to Ithaca. See you out there!

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Mar 29

Afterward, multiple people reached out to ask about our charts - we used Tamara Broderick’s “Distrosaurs” to illustrate statistical distributions. I’m delighted to share that the distrosaurs are available under a CC license: tamarabroderick.com/misc.html tamarabroderick.com/img/dino_rel...

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Mar 19

Today I am thinking about Ted Nelson's observation, embedded into the design of his iconic 1974 book, that you can't have a visionary technology future without politics. The book was two in one. After reading "Dream Machines" you turned it over for "Computer Lib."

Two covers of the books Computer Lib and Dream Machines by Ted Nelson (1974). The books are printed in the same binding. One shows the picture of a superman with a cape in jeans flying toward and touching a computer screen. The other shows a raised fist in the popular activist symbol with the words "Computer Lib" on top.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Feb 23

On the best days, the chance to be out in nature and reflect has been an opportunity to experience the transcendent. That was true today when I finally got outside after the air pollution finally cleared after ten days.

A massive flow of water rushes down Taughannock Falls in New York State, surrounded by ice and fog, in a photo taken several hundred feet above the creek below the waterfall.

A gravel path with bare trees in winter stretches out in front of the handlebars of a bicycle as it speeds along the path in the rain.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Feb 20

Hello myth of racial progress, my old friend www.wsj.com/business/dei...

A chart shows the share of new S&P 500 directors by demographic, showing that starting in 2021, the proportion of new S&P directors by demographic has returned to rates that include an even lower proportion of Black directors than before 2016 in the last year, after temporary gains.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Feb 18

Grateful to spend Ash Wednesday with the American Scientific Affiliation and Science for Churches to reflect, pray through, and lament the opposition that scientists and the scientific endeavor are facing in the US today. <3 I shared news, areas of repentance for scientists, and sources of hope.

Elijah in the Desert, 1818, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. By Washington Allston. The painting shows a barren tree next to a pond and barren rocks, with mountains and stormclouds in the distance. In the foreground, a small figure of a man accepts bread from a raven.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Feb 17

How are articles in a journal article related? This beautiful app by Nicolas Loizeau visualizes the citation graph of a list of papers. Here's the graph citations considered by Megan Price and me in our 2025 @pnas.org article on the science of AI citationgraph.org/graph/5cca22...

Network chart of the citation graph of an article in PNAS, illustrated by Citationgraph. The illustration shows a set of clusters of bubbles, with each bubble being an article connected to other articles by lines for every citation.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Feb 14

Tuesday I went for a walk with fellow Guatemalan Jose Zamora, Regional Director for the Americas at @pressfreedom.bsky.social Thursday, we celebrated that his journalist father has been moved from prison to house arrest, an imprisonment condemned by the UN & many other orgs cpj.org/2026/02/cpj-...

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Feb 3

In the most generous telling, US auto safety took 62 years, sustainable Tobacco governance took 100 years, and PFAS will take 94 years before being phased out in the US.

Scene from the film "Dark Waters" about PFAS toxicity.

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Dec 31

The @freepress.bsky.social report is profoundly clarifying- reviewing nearly 200 censorship attempts on media, civil society, government, academia, law, and companies, classifying the methods used. And this is only the most prominent cases. www.freepress.net/download/cho...

J. Nathan Matias@natematias· Dec 19

Thinking this weekend about a recent study on differences in effects between paid/professional punishment versus unpaid. This has relevance to many forms of cooperation, including the governance of online behavior by @raihanalam.bsky.social and @tagerai.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...