Here’s something that checks all kinds of boxes for me: Lori Emerson has a gorgeous new book coming soon (April) called Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, which you can preorder now from publisher Mexican Summer.

Other Networks is writer and researcher Lori Emerson’s speculative index of communications networks that existed before or outside of the internet: digital as well as analog, IRL as well as imagined, state-sponsored systems of control as well as homebrew communities in the footnotes of hacker culture.

You would be hard pressed to purposely conceive of a book more squarely aimed at my niche interests. And the book itself is a beautiful hardcover tome, rife with archival imagery as well as original artwork. Instant preorder material right here.

By the way, I discovered Mexican Summer and Lori’s book by way of Claire Evans on Bluesky, a site I am spending more time on as of late. Join me, won’t you?

I really enjoyed this writeup from Matt Webb about extending AIs using Anthropic’s proposed Model Context Protocol. In its own words, MCP is “an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs”.

Back in 2023 I wrote a bit about an early attempt at something similar by OpenAI and was pretty excited about the potential. MCP takes things to another level by making it an open protocol. Anyone can host an MCP server, or create a custom client that works with any language model.

Protocols are cool! And it’s fun to explore them. So I wanted to get a sense of MCP for myself.

I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get started with and see the potential of MCP servers. You don’t even have to build your own as there are lots that have been built and shared by the community. Here’s a great list of reference servers by Anthropic, and there are also over a thousand open source servers available.

If you do want to build your own, I recommend checking out this video from Cloudflare on how to get started using their open source workers-mcp package.

But to quickly get a sense of the potential of MCP, I recommend checking out an existing server first. I decided to start by exploring the Filesystem MCP server which is exactly what it sounds like: a server that gives an LLM access to your filesystem through various tools like read_file, list_directory, search_files, etc. This is great place to jump in and see the potential of MCP.

Adding the server to Claude’s desktop application (one of several clients that currently support the protocol) is as simple as dropping this into the app’s config file:

"filesystem": {
  "command": "npx",
  "args": [
    "-y",
    "@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem",
    "/Users/chase/Notes"
  ]
}

All this is really doing is allowing the LLM to run an npm package which implements an MCP server. Neat!

After restarting the Claude app, I was off to the races. I use Obsidian as my personal knowledge base, and the great thing about it is that it stores notes as plain text on the filesystem. Combined with the filesystem MCP server, I could now ask Claude about my own notes.

Here’s a screenshot from my very first time using the filesystem MCP server in Claude. I asked it to find my log file (the file I use for running notes throughout a year) and summarize the entries from the past month:

What’s fascinating here is the chain of thought the model goes through, and how it uses the tools exposed via the MCP server to solve problems. It starts by searching for files with a .log extension, doesn’t find anything, and thus broadens its search parameters and tries again. It’s then able to find and recognize my Log.md file, read its contents, and summarize them for me. Neat!

I’m really excited about the potential here to make computers more malleable for the masses. There’s been a lot said about the ability for non-technical folks to create their own apps using LLMs, but the ability for those LLMs to manipulate data and interact with APIs themselves might even reduce the need for a lot of dedicated apps entirely.

One of my favorite albums from last year was Mk.gee’s Two Star and the Dream Police, so I was delighted to recently discover this collaboration between Mk.gee and another artist I like called Dijon. If the electricity of their creative partnership in this video doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will.