We are welcoming Cennydd Bowles with their talk: "Revenants" at FFConf 2026.

We wanted to also thank Cennydd for taking the time to answer our questions so we can all get to know them a little bit more before Friday 13th November.

About Cennydd and their talk

• Title: Revenants

• About the talk: The web was a technical marvel that soon became a utopian project. But whose utopia? Depends who you asked. What values and visions do we see in today's web? How can we fight for alternatives?

• Cennydd's origin story: I fell in love with technology, but fell out of love with the industry that made it.

The warm up questions

Your doctoral research starts in October. What are you most looking forward to about being a student again?

Just the space to think. I just wrote a newsletter update explaining that I'm now motivated by understanding, not by influencing. I'm told PhD is a strip-mining of the soul in many ways, but it's also unparalleled in terms of the air cover it gives you to go deep on a topic, to really try to connect pieces that no one ever has before. That excites me.

"Revenants" and hauntology suggest ghosts. Is there a piece of old web that still haunts you?

There are bad ghosts and good ghosts, right? The early-to-mid social era generated some horrors: Yo and ChatRoulette come to mind in particular. But then there were also ideas like the Semantic Web, whose noble ambitions never came to pass.

About the work and the talk

Twenty years in tech, then a shift to researching what technology should do. What prompted the shift? And is there anything you miss from tech?

Partly age: I think many people working in tech need a different plan for the second half of their career. But also I came to the realisation that while I still love technology, the industry turns my stomach. There are still people fighting the good fight, but I wasn't prepared to be on anyone's team any more, to wear the branded gear at the cost of my own moral silence. And the anti-intellectualism of maker culture had made me feel mentally blunt.

I do miss the money, though.

Your talk description asks whose utopia the web became. Whose utopia did you think you were building twenty years ago?

This is, I suspect, the crux of my talk: I wasn't alert enough to realise there are multiple utopias, and that one group's utopia is frequently another's dystopia. I was caught up in the early web belief that connecting people is a universal good. But I'd not appreciated how tightly the tech sector's ideologies hewed to libertarian rhetoric, and how easily they could subsequently be hijacked by some of the world's worst people.

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Find out more about Cennydd online at cennydd.com and LinkedIn.

Join us in November to see Cennydd's talk: 2026.ffconf.org