My particular talents aren’t exactly oriented towards promoting small things, or building usable small systems. My sense is rather that the question of scale, and smallness, in particular, hasn’t yet been posed fully or correctly. The critical discourses about computers–media theory, science and technology studies, game studies, and so on–have grown up theorizing a technology surround that was getting bigger all the time. It’s time to think well about how to get small.

When I want information, like the real stuff, I go to forums. Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.

Alex writes:

Perhaps there is something to it, but perhaps there simply is something to writing hypertext. Alone.

I mean I don’t just make internal links. I link to other people and to Wikipedia. Ideally the entire web is one big web. “Wiki” was invented by Ward to make web quickly. Wiki means fast or quick.

Naive Weekly aims to expand what the internet is and can be. Every Sunday since 2018, I’ve delivered postcards with links to the quiet, odd and poetic web. I prefer avenues different from technology optimism, criticism and solutionism.

In the move to radically reinvent a ‘poetic’ web, I motion to look at the spaces that we have already cultivated. That digital intimacies are not just ‘built’ or ‘resolved’—that the act of cultivating this internet is beyond the hands of any technologist alone: it is in consciousness-raising, recognizing the dwellings and spaces people have already cultivated, and intentionality over what institutions & politics we are modeling this new web after.

pixeltastic

“The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream”