About

Welcome to the Stop!

I am Marco Fioretti, independent author, researcher, consultant and a few other things. I study, and try to explain, how your own civil rights and the quality of all areas of your life heavily depend on how software and digital technologies are used around you. My talks, publications, ebooks, course offering and other projects are on my main website.

The Stop, instead, is my main blog. I started it around 2007, in order to (as its logo tries to convey) give everybody a place where they can stop to refill their brains with things that matter, offered in deliberately short posts, with the simplest possible language.

About /img/about-stop-logo.jpg

When I started, I divided the Stop in four, partly independent sections (1): Digital World, Active Citizens, Education and LivingWorld.

Today, those sections still exist, but over time they have almost merged into each other. The reason is that yes, our age is dominated by digital technologies: but if you want to make the world a better place, you really need to “see the pattern that emerges when one views all the sciences at once” (2).

This is both terribly important, and much simpler to do than it seems, if you just get the right information. Sharing that information, without paywalls or abusive tracking, is the purpose of the Stop. And because it is urgent to share it, in the summer of 2019 I self-committed to publish an average of six posts per week, almost every week. Of course…

Please help me to keep the Stop running!

Browsing oceans of information, spotting what really matters and then presenting it here almost every day, in the simplest possible form, takes a lot (really a LOT) of time and effort. Please support it by any combination of:

Let’s get in touch!

Last but not least, you are of course very welcome to contact me via email, and follow me on Twitter, Facebook!

Notes:

  1. The original purposes of the four sections of the Stop are described in the original “About” Page
  2. I only discovered in 2019 that that is the definition of “omnology”