WordGate, BrowserGate, and the Name That Says It All
On the institutions that decide what you're allowed to know.
Infophilia, a Positive Psychology of Information | April 7, 2026 | Vol. 4, Issue 20
Artificial Intelligence | Information Styles | Intellectual Freedom | Toolbox | Wellbeing
Welcome to Infophilia, a living lab and weekly serial exploring how our love of information and connection can help us thrive, individually and collectively. This is also one of the places where adaptive infophilia theory is being developed as public scholarship â literary, curious, and always interested in who controls what we know, and why.
đAccess & Attribution: This serial offers free previews always and occasional open access essays to keep scholarship accessible. Students and those facing financial barriers can request complimentary access. If you find value here, please cite the original work and consider supporting the public scholarship through subscription. Proper attribution sustains this work.
Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2026). WordGate, BrowserGate, and the name that says it all: On the institutions that decide what youâre allowed to know. Infophilia, A Positive Psychology of Information, 4(20).
Todayâs essay. What begins as a rant about a missing Dictate button ends somewhere else entirely: from Redmond to Rome, from Kautilya's surveillance state to a pope who reads the book, from BrowserGate to schools, universities, and libraries. The picture that emerges turns out to have a name hiding in plain sight all along / Unlike the butterflies (and yes, the dreamers too) who are very sensibly enjoying Spring. đ”đŠ
Word count: 1,474 | Essay and Notes: 2,303
In honor of Spring Break, this weekâs issue is early and (we hope) funny. Weâll resume our usual schedule on April 18, just under two weeks from now.
Sneak preview: When we return, we'll be sharing an interview with Gaby Stevenson, a library science student from San Jose State, and how a last-minute invitation from Dr. Chow pulled her into the whirlwind of Washington D.C.'s legislative arena. Though she had never formally advocated before, she found the experience an unexpected lesson in the power of voice, the mechanics of federal funding, and the human connections that make policy real. The most powerful part of policy work is the person who turns abstract dollars into real books, shelves, and community spaces.
WordGate, BrowserGate, and the Name That Says It All
On the institutions that decide what youâre allowed to know
Some kinds of irony only become visible once you start pulling on a single thread.
I pulled on Microsoftâs.
It started, as these things always do, with something small and totally maddening: the discovery (again!) that standalone Word users â people who bought the software, with money, like adults â donât have access to the Dictate or Transcribe features. Those belong to Microsoft 365 subscribers only. You must pay monthly, perpetually, for the privilege of speaking to your own word processor. The software will not hear you unless you are current on your subscription.
This is, on its face, absurd. Today, it was merely the final absurdity in a very long line.
Windows Hello wants to scan your face. Cortana would very much like to listen to everything you say â and has, controversially, sometimes shared that with human reviewers. Recall, Microsoftâs now-infamous AI feature, screenshots what you do on your computer every few seconds and stores it locally, when enabled. And, the most alarming thing is how few people were alarmed.
And then there is LinkedIn.
Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, which means they own the one social network where you are required by professional convention to use your real name, your real employer, your real career history. LinkedIn recently became the subject of a report called âBrowserGateâ â a name that practically writes its own headline. According to the investigation, every time you visit the site, a hidden script runs silently in the background, scanning your browser for over 6,000 different extensions installed on your computer. Tax software. Grammar tools. Accessibility extensions. And allegedly job-search extensions. LinkedIn says the scanning is meant to identify scraping and protect platform integrity. Perhaps. But doing it silently, without disclosure, on the network where your real name and your employer are both visible â the audacity is fractal. Two years earlier, the LinkedIn iPhone app was caught reading users' clipboards after every keystroke: passwords, medical records, whatever happened to be copied. The company called it a bug. Sure. Bug. The pattern is hard to ignore.
Zoom out further and the picture becomes â thereâs no other word for it â Arthashastra in scope.