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Hannah Arendt’s conception of “the social” offers a novel perspective on contemporary debates over social media. Both critics and defenders of social media giants such as Facebook (now Meta) construe the problem with social media as a proliferation of untruths that is either the cost of liberalism or a danger requiring regulations. Arendt would have us be dubious of both conclusions while also rejecting both sets of premises. Rather, Arendt’s framework allows a diagnosis of the problem with social media as a deeper problem with the form of society itself, a problem that would remain untouched by increased regulatory measures against social media giants.

Digital reconstructions provide an accurate and reliable way to store, share, model, quantify, and analyze neural morphology. Continuous advances in cellular labeling, tissue processing, microscopic imaging, and automated tracing catalyzed a proliferation of software applications to reconstruct neural morphology. These computer programs typically encode the data in custom file formats. The resulting format heterogeneity severely hampers the interoperability and reusability of these valuable data. Among these many alternatives, the SWC file format has emerged as a popular community choice, coalescing a rich ecosystem of related neuroinformatics resources for tracing, visualization, analysis, and simulation. This report presents a standardized specification of the SWC file format. Additionally, we introduce xyz2swc, a free online service that converts all 23 reconstruction formats (and 68 variations) described in the scientific literature into the SWC standard. The xyz2swc service is available open source through a user-friendly browser interface (https://neuromorpho.org/xyz2swc/ui/) and an Application Programming Interface (API).