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.
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:
- donations of any amount through PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay
- sharing as much as possible the posts you find here
- or in these other ways
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:
- The original purposes of the four sections of the Stop are described in the original “About” Page
- I only discovered in 2019 that that is the definition of “omnology”
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
To this end, I have already shared more than a million words on this blog, without any paywall or user tracking, and am sharing the next million through a newsletter, also without any paywall.
The more direct support I get, the more I can continue to inform for free parents, teachers, decision makers, and everybody else who should know more stuff like this. You can support me with paid subscriptions to my newsletter, donations via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.THANKS for your support!