This week, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on the future of net neutrality. Whether you’ve been following the political back and forth, skimming the headlines, or struggling to decode acronyms, the decision will have an impact on what we can do online (and who can afford to do it). Because the internet has effectively been free and open since the day it was born, it’s easy to lose sight of the impact this vote will have.

The reality is, the internet is a fragile thing. Open, crazy, weird spaces where people swap stories and secrets, create rad digital art projects, type furiously and freely with people seven time zones away — these spaces are rare. People build them, people sustain them, and now, people are trying to restrict them. If this week’s vote passes — which is looking increasingly likely — the internet’s gatekeepers will have more control over their gates than ever before.

Because we live and breathe the internet, laugh and cry on the internet, connect with people who’ve tangibly changed our lives on the internet, we decided to gather some perspectives on this moment in time. Why it matters, how we got here, and what the future may hold. Here are some of the most insightful essays we’ve found on Medium to help us make sense of the fight to keep the net wild and free.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Now, he’s defending it. “I want an internet where consumers decide what succeeds online, and where ISPs focus on providing the best connectivity,” Berners-Lee emphasizes. Content and connectivity are two distinct markets, and they must remain separate. Conflating them risks blocking innovation, free expression, and the kind of creativity that can only thrive online.

What’s happening now is not just about net neutrality, law professor Lawrence Lessig argues, but about the foundations of our democracy. Tracing the history of the concept from its origins in the aughts (one of his students, Tim Wu, coined the term “net neutrality”), Lessig sees the rollback of Obama-era regulations as a symptom of a larger issue: a democracy that doesn’t serve its people.

Through statistical analysis and natural language processing, data scientist Jeff Kao shows that millions of pro-repeal comments submitted to the FCC were faked. Organic public comments, according to Kao’s analysis, overwhelmingly supported preserving existing regulations. The report calls into question the legitimacy of the FCC’s comment process, and the basis of chairman Pai’s intention to roll back regulations.

In part one of a five-part series on net neutrality, computer scientist Tyler Elliot Bettilyon takes us back to FDR’s New Deal. Piecing together the history of “common carrier” laws — those that govern everything from shipping to telephone lines — Bettilyon contextualizes today’s fight for a free and open internet.

Social psychologist E Price interrogates the idea that the internet we’ve grown to love is really as “free and open” as we’d like to think. “Internet activity is already deeply centralized,” Erika writes, and major social media sites are today’s answer to the Big Three TV networks of a few decades ago. The internet is closer to cable than we think, and it’s (probably) about to get even closer.

Why should the internet be a public utility? Economist umair haque debunks the “competition will lower prices” argument against internet regulation, and makes a compelling case for why going online, “just like water, energy, and sanitation,” should be a basic right: “It dramatically elevates our quality of life, best and truest when we all have free and equal access to it.”

Visit battleforthenet to write or call your congressperson in advance of the vote. You can also text a few words of your choice to Resistbot.

Who owns the internet? was originally published in 3 min read on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Even photos can’t capture the essence of some things — like a total solar eclipse or the swoop of Donald Trump’s bangs. For those things, we have cartoons. Images that, in just a few hand-drawn lines, can interrogate political movements and the way we live our lives. For Liza Donnelly, cartoons are a way to establish common ground, even if it’s just through a shared eyeroll. “I don’t really think a cartoon can change someone’s mind,” she says, “but it can start a dialogue.”

Huddled over an iPad in her New York City apartment, Liza draws the news in real time. Her days begin by checking CNN, CBS, NPR, and Twitter. Digital stroke by stroke, Liza gets to the core of the politics behind women’s fashion and the Russia investigation. Trump’s promises and his priorities. Her cartoons make us laugh just as often as they make us… cringe. Or question. Or march.

Liza grew up in D.C. during the Watergate era, when editorial cartoons like Doonesbury were becoming a popular fixture in national newspapers. Cartoons were hot takes before hot takes, and Liza developed an appreciation for their ability to make succinct political statements. As she explains in a recent member-only feature, cartoons have a magical ability to transcend partisanship and help viewers see “what’s really going on.”

After graduating college, Liza worked in a museum. Her opinions weren’t strong enough (yet) for editorial cartooning, but she was sending cartoons to The New Yorker when she found the time. The third cartoon she sold was a political cartoon — about Walter “Fritz” Mondale. With that, Liza became one of the magazine’s few female cartoonists.

She didn’t think much of being a woman and a cartoonist until 2001, when a friend invited her to join a panel at the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists. As Liza describes it, “when I got there, and saw this panel, we looked out on all the members of the organization, sitting in this crowded room, and they were all men!” The experience was eye-opening, and it prompted Liza to write her book Funny Ladies, a history of female cartoonists at The New Yorker.

Fast-forward a decade, and the internet has placed even more power in cartoonists’ hands. In 2005, the Muhammad comics instigated worldwide protests. A decade later, Charlie Hebdo shootings reminded us just how controversial a single panel can be. After 9/11, Liza dedicated more of her work to activism and women’s issues: “I just decided,” she says, “I’m tired of being silent about these things. I’ve got to draw about it.” “Humor is powerful,” Liza reflects. It has the power to bring people together or pull them apart.

Lately, Liza has used Medium for an entirely new way of cartooning: live drawing. Using Medium as a public sketchbook, Liza draws everything from the Oscars to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. (Liza serves as CBS News/CBS This Morning’s official Resident Cartoonist, if you’re wondering how she gets invited.) Her work reaches thousands of viewers, who “tune in” as Liza renders reality in delightful shapes and colors. It’s just another way to get people talking, thinking, and (most importantly) laughing.

Check out some of Liza’s most Noteworthy stories:

• Editorial Cartooning, Then and Now
• A Day Drawing At The White House
• Drawing The Eclipse
• Women’s March In Washington, DC

Liza Donnelly was originally published in Noteworthy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It started with a Venn diagram. Sarah Cooper was sitting in a meeting at Yahoo. It was her first job in tech. Adults varied the cadence of their nods and encouraged each other to “take a step back.” During a lull in the conversation, a brave product manager walked to the whiteboard and drew two imperfect, intersecting circles: the universal symbol for I’ve Got A Brilliant Idea.

What was on the inside didn’t matter — everyone started arguing over the diagram anyway, debating its labels and the size of its circles. Sarah took note: The product manager had successfully Appeared Smart in a Meeting.

Seven years later, Sarah reflected on the incident (and others like it). She distilled them into one of her first posts on Medium: 10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings. It ricocheted through Slack channels worldwide, making all of us a little more self-aware about how we do our jobs. From overzealously agreeing with each other to asking whether the questions “on the table” are really “the right questions for us to ask” — we’re all just trying to look good under unflattering fluorescent lights.

Judging by the success of that first post, it was obvious there was an audience for a new kind of corporate satire — not The Office, but… The Slack. Rather than cubicles and commutes, Sarah focuses on pretentious engineers and the everlasting awkwardness that is videoconferencing. Her pieces probe the hidden layer of comedy underneath Silicon Valley’s slick exterior.

Born in Jamaica as the youngest of four, Sarah’s childhood dream was to be an actress. “I’ve always been fascinated by the masks people put on,” she says. It’s the truth that grounds her humor: “We’re all putting on a show,” observes Sarah. At the office, where we’re (too often) hyper-concerned with our standing amongst the pack, “we get very robotic, and do exactly what we see other people do.” All the conference room’s a stage, and every middle-manager merely a player.

Sarah pursued acting and stand-up comedy, but hewed to the straight-and-narrow during business hours. She earned a Master’s degree in design, which led her to work at Yahoo, and eventually, Google. It became a game — one long, meticulously branded ladder. “If you want to be in middle management,” she realized, “just please your upper management. That’s a pretty good way to get ahead.”

And it worked. Sarah got promoted, and found herself in front of highly influential whiteboards and conference tables. But something was missing. “I never really felt like I could be myself in work situations,” she says. “I felt like I was just kind of saying what people wanted to hear, and the real me was observing somebody doing something stupid” — like drawing a borderline-meaningless Venn diagram and playing it off as brilliant.

So she kept writing, finding comedy in everything from email etiquette to performance reviews to diversity in tech. Her pieces feature original illustrations and infographics like a bar chart displaying the percentage of tech executives who (really) love craft beer. One of her most popular posts, 9 Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women, illustrates the under-discussed realities of being a female leader (phrasing directives as questions, anyone?). In the words of one reader, “the best humor is the kind that hits so close to home that there’s this awkward adjustment period after you realize it’s not meant to be real.”

Last year, Sarah published her first book: 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings. It’s a tribute to that first Medium post, classifying ever more subtle (actually… not subtle) things we do on the daily to look like we know what we’re doing.

What’s Sarah’s next trick? She just wants to keep making us laugh, without overthinking it: “I want to enjoy and giggle and be excited about the thing I’m working on, and keep my expectations low so I’m never disappointed.”

Check out some of Sarah’s most Noteworthy stories:

• From Medium to Book Deal in 12 Months
• 10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings
• How to Be Passive Aggressive When Collaborating in Google Docs
• Why Do All These Women Keep Accusing Me of Sexual Harassment?

Sarah Cooper was originally published in Noteworthy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jessica Semaan’s earliest memory is one of her most difficult: packing her belongings into a car and driving to the bomb shelters of coastal Lebanon. The Lebanese Civil War was peaking, and shells were raining down on her home. Her family survived, but Jessica never forgot the feeling of being at war. Thirty years later, those memories have crystallized into an intense desire to heal and to write.

On an internet that judges, criticizes, and “takes,” Jessica’s poems and stories are an oasis of honesty and vulnerability. Every piece offers clear perspectives on self-love, ambition, and how (not) to change yourself. Writing is how Jessica accesses her shadow — the part of herself that’s scariest to share. Envy, loneliness, shame, lust. All the things we love to conceal behind soft-focus filters and ironic emojis.

“A bomb exploded in the courtyard of my primary school,” writes Jessica in a story about the war. In another piece about pain — experiencing it, remembering it, unpacking it like the worst-ever time capsule — she explains, “We don’t write about suffering enough… We socially compartmentalize it until it becomes an old chatty neighbor we avoid every morning as we walk to work.” She uses words like tiny headlamps, illuminating all the internal cobwebs.

There’s no school for this kind of writing. “I didn’t study writing, it’s not like I got a degree in literature. English is not my first language,” Jessica reminds us, “so if I can write, you can write. And now, more than ever, we need people to write.” You don’t have to master sentence structure or memorize The Elements of Style, you just need to have something to say.

Jessica immigrated to the U.S. seven years ago. After four years working at Airbnb, she began to express herself on the internet. Her process is hardly scientific: She surfs the waves of intuition and memory, looking for inspiration in green, watery places. The beach, the park, the woods. Jessica sits, strolls, taps some initial ideas into her phone, meditates a bit, and taps some more. “I wouldn’t want to over-rationalize it,” she says. Ideas often arrive after emptiness, like a breakup or a bout of paralyzing depression.

In our short film, Jessica dives deeper into why she writes and what she’s learned from it.

One of her most popular pieces, “Fuck changing yourself,” plucked the rawest of chords in millions of readers. “Stop land filling your soul,” she writes, “Stop overcrowding your genius. Be naked. Live naked. Thrive naked. Fly naked.” The lines have been highlighted so many times it’s amazing you can still see them. Hundreds of readers responded with words of gratitude (and abundant exclamation points). It’s clear Jessica’s words have healing powers.

More than just writing for herself, or for us, Jessica also writes for her family. During the war, her parents endured a numbing amount of trauma. Survival was paramount. “I view my writing as one of the ways I’m liberating a lot of Arab women in my region,” says Jessica. “A lot of the writing that I do is also in a way to heal my family, because they couldn’t do it.”

In everything she writes, Jessica asks us to stare deep into the face of our issues. Our shit. Get to know it. Feel it out. Use words if you can manage. “Whether you like it or not,” she says, “if we are at war with ourselves, this war will manifest to others.” Peace comes after visiting the darkest, most difficult places, and living to write about it.

Check out some of Jessica’s most Noteworthy stories:

• Fuck yes, you’re a writer
• When you can’t love yourself
• Why I am going to Standing Rock
• Fuck changing yourself

Jessica Semaan was originally published in Noteworthy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s D.C. in the 80s, and young Baratunde is doing tae kwon do. Or maybe it’s karate. Or Boy Scouts. Or tinkering with one of the first personal computers on the block. As he remembers it, family friends would say he had the face of a young Muhammad Ali. Never one to settle on a single path, Baratunde was already beginning to form a worldview that’s best encapsulated in a few sentences from The Greatest: “Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion.”

Today, Baratunde is nothing if not himself. “First and foremost,” he declares, “I’m Baratunde. It’s a unique job title.” Flip through his stories and you’ll find a few alternative vocations: vigilante pundit, love-letter writer, media critic, your personal tour guide through Black Mirror IRL. Offline, he performs stand-up. He boxes (or practices yoga, depending on the day). He tries to be an informed, engaged citizen at a time when doing so is… challenging, if we’re into euphemisms. It all falls somewhere under the “comedy” umbrella — Baratunde calls it “pro-justice comic expression.”

But humor is a many-edged sword. It cuts as it heals. With internet credentials including former Digital Director at The Onion and co-founder of Jack and Jill Politics, Baratunde knows how to make us laugh — but also how to make us think (often, about why we’re laughing). His bestselling book, How to Be Black, satirizes identity politics and narrates his childhood. With chapters on “How to Be The Black Friend” and “How to Speak for All Black People,” it interrogates the media’s increasingly glib way of talking about race.

The book’s premise took shape back in D.C., where Baratunde developed a complicated relationship with being black. His father was killed before he was 10, a casualty of D.C.’s crack scene. His mother programmed government software by day and practiced political activism by night. In sixth grade, he left public school for Sidwell Friends, the alma mater of President Obama’s daughters. “I was exposed to significant numbers of white people for the first time,” he remembers, “and that took some work… but it worked out.”

In school, Baratunde was the tech whisperer. The kid in the lab, dialing up Dr. Internet. (“I didn’t have any girlfriends until college,” Baratunde reminisces, “probably because of the damn computers.”) As a writer for the high school newspaper, he covered the day the school’s library first connected to the Internet (capitalized, like a newly discovered planet). Two decades later, he republished the article on Medium, triggering waves of collective nostalgia.

His fascination with tech evolved into an obsession with words — spoken, recorded, pixelated. If speech is like whittling, Baratunde imagines, “writing is like full-on sculpture.” After he was commissioned by National Geographic to investigate high arrest rates for black citizens of Gretna, Louisiana, Baratunde felt there was still more to say. So he turned to Medium, and — in a trilogy of stories — took us behind the camera. From being heckled by locals as he films on the street to riding shotgun with a bounty hunter in a car named “Relentless,” he showed us how much legwork it takes to get under the hood of race relations in America. (Turns out it takes… a lot.) It’s the same kind of hyper-engaged digital work he did as a producer for The Daily Show, where he gave us The Zuckerbaby (and other gems).

What keeps Baratunde showing up? Ever-expanding possibilities for digital expression. “My interest in tech is not gadget-based; it’s freedom-based,” he says. Especially in today’s political climate, humor is a necessary refuge. “Laughter’s a pretty good drug, and it’s not heavily regulated, at least not yet,” he contends. Comedy gives us an intellectual high, and the internet is our best dispensary.

Baratunde sees a future where, through comedy and expression, we can hack humanity — not a biohack, exactly, but “an educational, media, and cultural hack.” A way to hard-code the lessons of history into society. To upgrade our collective firmware, so we can stop repeating the same mistakes. His words are an open beta.

Hear Baratunde’s tech-inspired vision for the future in our short film.

Expect more punch-ups in Baratunde’s biweekly column for Medium members, Active Citizenship. Including audio narrations by none other than himself, Baratunde addresses everything from mass incarceration to data detoxes. “Words are my friends,” he says, “and they’ve gotten me through some tough times.” Here’s hoping they’ll get us through these turbulent times, too.

Check out some of Baratunde’s most Noteworthy stories:

• My Love Letter To Immigrants #ToImmigrantsWithLove
• In 1993, This Is What I Wrote About The Internet Coming To My High School
• What Mansplainr, a Business Card Gun, and 145 Other Funny App Ideas Say About Today’s Tech Culture
• Active Citizenship

Baratunde Thurston was originally published in Noteworthy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Like champagne in a soda bottle or a Shakespearean play written in emoji, Alana Massey bridges high culture and low. Reverence and irreverence. Virtue, vice, and all the gray areas in between. With a catalog spanning fashion, 90's cartoons, and unabashed celebrity worship, her stories reveal the intersection between what we click, swipe, or share — and who we are.

Arriving in New York after college, Alana admits to being “a walking cliché of a disastrous 20-something.” You’ve heard this story before: Girl meets City, rents an apartment, and promptly embarrasses herself. A disappointing assistant job + a dwindling bank account + a few (or more) nights of regrettable sex = a good story, right? Almost. When Alana’s jobs left her high and dry, she supported herself by working as a stripper. That’s Departure #1 from the Twenty-Something Fable. The second is what happens next.

In an attic, or a basement, or a USB stick somewhere is Alana’s degree from Divinity School. She graduated from Yale five years ago with a Master’s in Religion. “I was just a messy 24-year-old who loved church,” she admits. “I sort of caught Christianity like a cold.” What little faith she had, though, was DOA. Yale provided a lot to chew on, but not much to believe in. “I found what I learned informing me much more when I got back to New York than shaping my worldview while I was there.”

Packing up her faith and heading back to Brooklyn, she began to write — personal essays, at first, until she found a niche. Guided by her experience finding (and losing) religion, Alana views culture through the lens of belief: Where do we seek truth? Celebrity. Beauty. Pop music. Are you a Directioner? Alana sure is. She often expounds on the wonders of One Direction, and how — to quote a recent story — “they are a cultural moment that borders on the holy.” Alana is also a Winona… who morphed into a Gwyneth. She is, above all, Against Chill. With every story, Alana crystallizes cultural trends, unpacking our idols in front of our eyes.

And people love it. “Against Chill,” which dissects millennials’ tendency to avoid commitment, reached millions. “Indecision is not a noble virtue,” reads one of its most highlighted sentences. Of the oft-sexted phrase, “I don’t really like putting labels on things,” Alana argues: “But putting labels on things are how people find the exit during a fire and make sure they’re adding vanilla extract to the cake instead of arsenic.” Seeking a voice of reason in an ocean of ambivalent hook-ups, several readers responded with variations on “thank you.”

Hear Alana describe what it’s like to write about her own life — and the lives of her celebrity crushes — in our short film.

Escaping New York with her cat and a suitcase full of Harry Styles fan art, Alana recently bid goodbye (to all that). Home, now, is a 19th-century farmhouse near Woodstock, New York, nestled in the woods. Waking up at 5 a.m. every day, she is as dedicated to writing as some are to religion. It’s a brand of adulting Alana never would’ve expected in her 20s.

But people change. We live multiple lives, all at once. “There’s an intellectual self, there’s a romantic self, there’s a new friendship self,” Alana says. The internet, above all, may be the best place for us to curate and share these fragments of our identities. “In writing, I am Alana Massey: semi-broken, but hopeful, apostate about religion and the end of the world, and theology and grace.” One story later, she’ll transform into “Alana! Unlucky in Love! Cat lover and Harry Styles fan!” There is no correct answer. Alana’s words remind us that we contain multitudes.

In her new book, All The Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen To Be Famous, Alana prays at the altar of every celebrity she’s ever worshipped: Lana Del Rey, Anna Nicole Smith, Nicki Minaj. The book encapsulates this writer’s unique lens: social critique meets unapologetic fandom. “I’m sorry I wrote my feelings all over your internet,” reads Alana’s forever-bio. And the internet wouldn’t be the same without them.

Check out some of Alana’s most Noteworthy stories:

• Against Chill
• Hold Your Laughter: Men Could Learn Something From One Direction
• Unsolicited New Year’s Resolutions for Others

Alana Massey was originally published in Noteworthy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ezinne Ukoha was standing on a crowded bus in Los Angeles. It was hot, standing-room only, and definitely not a place where you’d expect inspiration to strike. But Ezinne was catching feelings, so she tapped out a poem on her phone. It struck a chord, prompted responses, got people talking. In response to one reader, Ezinne wrote: “I am lucky that I have a way to release myself from the mental hijackers that temporarily threaten but are scared away by my words.”

With a defiant sense of curiosity, Ezinne unpacks all the conversations — from race to mental health to That Thing Donald Trump Said Yesterday — in a visceral, honest way. Her words touch everything from media to the Women’s March to the plight of Ryan Lochte. Just as often, they are evergreen and lyrical. Rather than “covering” topics for the sake of being topical, Ezinne does it because she knows it matters. “The key,” Ezinne explains, “is having a vested interest in what you are expressing.”

But freedom of expression is never free. Born in America but raised in Nigeria, Ezinne remembers when Dele Giwa — a journalist covering the Nigerian government — was assassinated. A mail bomb, sent to his home in Lagos. Her mother was also a writer, and it hit home. “I’ll never forget when that happened,” admits Ezinne, who — even then — aspired to one day type truth to power. “I just remembered, as young as I was, thinking I cannot express myself here.”

So she moved to the States — first for college, as one of the only black girls at a school in the Midwest — expecting The Dream. America was supposed to be the land of plenty: streets paved with Twizzlers and Oreo cookies, the Wizard of Oz handing out liberal arts degrees and 401ks. Then the LA riots happened. Ezinne began to notice segregation on campus. The Dream faded into reality. “Black America is under siege here,” Ezinne realized, “this is real — racism is real.”

Fast-forward two soul-draining corporate jobs, and Ezinne now lives in Los Angeles. She pours her opinions into her phone, laptop, or whatever device is within tapping distance. Ezinne notes, “I never wanted to be the race writer,” but she often found herself speaking up for her community. Writing about being a dark-skinned black woman, she waxes lyrical: “When the lights are out — and the white sheets soak our sweat, we shimmer just for the ones who see us glowing in competition with the moon.” Her words hit that rare bubble on the Venn diagram of internet expression — the one where personal, political, and poetic overlap.

Her stories travel quickly, igniting conversation and prompting digital head-nods. After unpacking Post-Obama Stress Disorder — and reflecting on her Nigerian-American Dream — readers reacted with a combination of recognition and gratitude. A story about lost girls of color triggered some much-needed wake-up calls. Ezinne’s words sometimes burn — or indict, or expose, or reveal — and people listen.

What keeps the ideas coming? It all goes back to 1980s Nigeria: “I’m more empowered to say what I have to say because I know what can happen when you live in a country where you can’t do that.” These stories are visceral, without pre-planned angles or hooks. Fueled by memories of censorship, Ezinne avoids anything that looks like a filter: editors, gatekeepers, even her own inner critic. “When it comes to the tone, my voice, what I’m trying to convey,” she admits, “I want it to be as naked as possible.”

Watch our short film for more on what keeps Ezinne hitting publish.

In a world where so many stories feel overproduced or pre-packaged, these words are raw, immediate, and undeniably real. And they’re having an impact. “I am definitely optimistic about the future,” Ezinne reflects. “I think all of it — artists, writers, singers, whatever it is — all of us are banding together and using our skills to enlighten, and it’s making a dent. A good dent. It’s definitely encouraging young voices, and it’s waking people up.”

Check out some of Ezinne’s most Noteworthy stories and series:

• I Don’t Write About Racism Because I Hate White People
• Girls on Film - Medium
• Why Girls of Color Missing in America, is Never a Crisis, Because It’s a Problem We Can Guiltlessly…
• Be That Writer

Ezinne Ukoha was originally published in Noteworthy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Imagine a world where everyone knows how to code. A world where “programming ninja” finally exits the zeitgeist because, well… that’s all of us now. A world where we can all squash bugs (if we want), automate our most annoying tasks, and build the future with our lightning-fast fingertips. Welcome to Quincy Larson’s world. Though it hasn’t fully materialized yet, he’s building it every day.

As the founder of freeCodeCamp, a community where anyone can learn to program, Quincy is the central node in a growing network of aspiring developers scattered across the world. The program is free, open-source, and self-paced. To inspire Campers, Quincy writes Medium posts blending futurism, technology, and tips for the aspiring programming wizard. How true are the doomsday rumors about automation stealing our jobs? Ever wanted to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour? Quincy’s got some ideas (and, often, some questions).

Raised in Oklahoma City, Quincy never intended to be a programmer. Before learning to program, he worked in schools — first as a teacher, then as a principal. In a sort of proto-hack, Quincy automated teachers’ basic tasks (attendance and other headaches). Aha, he thought: tech + education = impact. A code camp was born, and Quincy has hardly taken a day off since.

A virtual water cooler for all things tech, Quincy’s freeCodeCamp publication is a space to swap tips about entrepreneurship, analyses of big-picture tech trends, and personal stories from the Silicon trenches. Contributors geek out on JavaScript, machine learning, and what “minimum viable product” actually means. With almost 250,000 followers, stories race across the interwebs, sparking discussion about what tomorrow brings.

In one of his most popular stories, Quincy sounds a (thoughtful) warning about the future of net neutrality. The internet “is a Cambrian Explosion of ideas and execution,” he argues, and it’s at risk of becoming just another maze of walled gardens (think: cable TV). The solution? Education. Read, contact your representatives, and — better yet — learn to code. The story encapsulates Quincy’s passion to ensure the internet stays as free as it was born. With over 100 responses, it’s clearly making people think.

Why is this conversation so important, especially today? “Technology helps people have a voice,” believes Quincy. It’s our digital megaphone, the place where we go to cut out the middleman. Access to tech, and our ability to shape its development, has the potential to solve some of humanity’s trickiest problems. (Of which there seem to be a lot lately.) Luckily, Quincy knows “there are already a tremendous number of developers out there who care, who have an itch to scratch and create their own tools.” The key is giving them the skills to do it.

Watch our short film to hear Quincy’s vision for programming and beyond, in his own words.

Now, Quincy has moved back in Oklahoma City from San Francisco, splitting his time between code, words, and family. What does the future hold — not just for programmers, but for tech writ large? “I think technology has always made things better,” he laughs, “I would never criticize someone for trying to make things more efficient. When they make the chips that just interface with your brain (if they’re secure), I’ll probably get one, you know?”

While we wait on that chip, Quincy continues to connect people, ideas, and code. And not just for himself, or for us, but for his daughter, who turns two in just a few months. Eventually, she’ll learn to play with code. But for now, blocks will suffice. Either way, the real motivation, for Quincy, is that ”she will grow up in the America I seek to make.”

Check out some of Quincy’s most Noteworthy stories and series:

• The future of the open internet — and our way of life — is in your hands
• How Net Neutrality Works and Why it's So Damn Important - Medium
• We asked 20,000 people who they are and how they’re learning to code
• How to set up a VPN in 10 minutes for free (and why you urgently need one)

Quincy Larson was originally published in Noteworthy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This month, in honor of April Fool’s Day, we’re featuring some of our favorite humor writing. Satire, parody, and wit. Punching up, sounding off, and speaking jokes to power. On each of the next four weekends, we’ll share a new selection of laughs:

• Cubicle comedy: Laughing on the job.
• Silicon satire: Poking fun a tech culture — the good, the bad, the buggy.
• Un-lifehacking: Satirizing self-help, One Weird Trick at a time.
• The Swamp: Roasting our elected officials, and all things politically (in)correct.

We’ll unveil a new collection every Friday on our homepage. Got something funny? Drop us a line: tips@medium.com.

This is the third in a series of monthly themes — browse our Women’s Month and Love collections for more.

This month, we’re featuring stories about women: past, present, and future. Over the next four weekends, we’ll share a new collection of stories:

• Pioneer women: Hidden (and not so hidden) figures in women’s history.
• Body talk: On women’s health — reproductive and otherwise.
• Women’s work: Leaning in, out, and sideways.
• Feminism 2.0: On intersectionality and the future of feminism.

We’ll unveil a new collection each Friday on our homepage. Have a story that fits this month’s theme? Drop us a line at tips@medium.com.

This is the second in a series of monthly themes — read our Love collections here.