Category: Digital Culture
Letter Club
Letter Club, a new project from Naz Hamid and Scott Robbin, looks very cool. From Naz’s announcement post:
Not physical letters, but digital letters that arrive with traditional mail’s rhythm. It’s a private group newsletter that everyone contributes to and receives. It’s intentionally slow, purposeful, and deeply gratifying — a low-stress, high-signal way to stay connected that creates meaningful moments in a social world dominated by drive-by likes and fleeting attention.
I love this concept and I’m thinking of a number of cool topics worth exploring in this small group format:
- A record club where we share new additions to our collections
- An adventure club that shares highlights and recaps of running, cycling, hiking or climbing endeavors
- A BBQ club focused on smoker & grill experiments and recipes
If one of these ideas resonates with you, hit me up. Awesome stuff, Naz and Scott!
Update: I created a club called Get in My Earholes that asks the question, “What’s the best record you’ve added to your collection recently?” Feel free to join the club…first letter goes out on 8/9 and then every 2 weeks after that.
This informative post from A New Social does a great job highlighting the nuances and differences between bridging and cross-posting on the open web:
Notably, bridging results in more unified conversations, while cross-posted conversations are more fragmented.
My site bridges to both Mastodon and Bluesky, which is great because I never have to look at either in order to participate in conversations on both platforms.
Can’t wait to talk to you all soon. My phone number is the square root of all of our combined social interaction times Pi.
HBD Jack! And kudos for lasting as long as you did. I wish you would have let me know, though. I’d have gifted you mine.
Related: This video for White’s stellar Archbishop Harold Holmes is fantastic. (via Dom Tyer & @patrickrhone)
“There’s not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed”
An AI “band” is racking up hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify. What kind of world are we living in? Soon there will just be an opaque layer of robots between all human connection.
This Site in Perpetuity
Not to get morbid, but turning 47 yesterday started me thinking about the persistence and legacy of this site if I were to suddenly get gone. One of the main purposes of StaticMade.com for me is to leave a public mark or a detailed record of my time, thoughts and consciousness while on this planet. How might I ensure it persists if something unforeseen happens?
Coincidentally today, Manton (founder of Micro.blog, the platform I use to publish Static Made) posted some information about his policy on scenarios of subscription lapses and untimely death:
If you have ever paid for hosting with us, and you haven’t violated our terms of service or community guidelines, we keep your blog online forever, even after you’ve stopped paying for your subscription.
I think this is a very proactive and generous policy. So as long as there is a plan for domain management, the site should remain online in perpetuity. Thanks Manton!
A Dream for the Web
I dream of a web that’s small and strange and wonderful. Where personal websites grow like gardens – each one unique, crafted by hand, reflecting the beautiful weirdness of its creator. Where the web feels big because it’s made of small, individual voices.
I dream of a web where people own their words. Where our thoughts live on our own property, not rented from a company that can disappear voices on a whim. Where writing exists because you have something to say, not because the appetite of the algorithm demands it.
I dream of a web where linking is loving. Where hyperlinks have power, where blogrolls make comebacks, where discovery happens through human curation rather than manipulation by machines. Where following a thread of links can lead down rabbit holes of genuine fascination.
I dream of a web that respects our attention. Where websites load quickly because they’re not bloated with tracking scripts and surveillance infrastructure. Where reading an article doesn’t trigger an onslaught of analytics events and cookie consent banners. Where the interface serves the content, not the advertiser.
I dream of a web that’s accessible to everyone – not just those who can afford the latest devices or fastest connections. Where sites work on old phones and slow networks because the creators remembered that the web is for everyone, not just the privileged.
I dream of a web where communities form around shared interests rather than shared platforms. Where discussions thrive, where posts feel like letters from friends, where feeds let you choose your own reading rhythm instead of surrendering to an infinite scroll.
I dream of a web that’s built by humans for humans. Where the goal isn’t to automate away human expression through artificial intelligence, but to amplify the unique perspectives that only humans can offer.
I dream of a web that moves at human speed. Where conversations unfold over days and weeks instead of milliseconds. Where depth matters more than virality, and reflection is worth more than reaction. Where you can disappear for a month and come back to find your community still there, still talking, still caring.
I dream of a web where silence is golden. Where not every moment needs to be documented, shared, or optimized for engagement. Where digital sabbaths are respected, where being offline isn’t a productivity failure, where the most profound connections happen when the screens are dark.
I dream of a web that doesn’t just connect our devices, but connects our souls. That doesn’t just transfer data, but transfers meaning.
Joan Westenberg took off her smartwatch and wrote about how that small act has impacted her awareness and intuition:
What returned: a sense of calm. I could go to sleep without being scored. I could go for a walk without a badge. I started noticing things again - how I feel after coffee, the way my breath slows near water.
She’s a much more eloquent writer than I am, but her thoughts are very similar to mine on the topic of quantified self.
For those curious, I’m rocking a Timex Expedition these days and not looking back.
With respect and syrup, this dude hacked the Waffle House website as a hurricane barreled toward his home in Florida:
The Waffle House Index is an (incredibly) unofficial tool used by FEMA to gauge the severity of natural disasters. Why Waffle House? Because they’re infamous for not closing even during the worst of storms. If the House is closed, that means things are getting real. The problem with the Waffle House Index is that there’s not really an actual “index” you can check.
What a great story! And great to hear Waffle House was (somewhat) cool about the whole thing.
Long Live the Zine
Pittsburgh-based nonprofit news outlet PublicSource is experimenting with a new printed edition, although not the typical format for which legacy media is known. Taking a page from the underground publishing playbook, PublicSource is releasing neighborhood-focused zines intended to meet communities where they are – at coffee shops, community centers, their neighbor’s home – and create a hyperlocal publication with impact.
Zines are independently published, noncommercial publications that are often handmade and focus on very specific subject matter. They carry a storied history, with some scholars tracing zine lineage back to Thomas Paine’s political pamphlet Common Sense in 1776. The modern era of zine culture in the U.S. was ushered in during the late-19th century’s amateur press movement and carried through the 20th century with help from the Harlem Renaissance, science fiction fandom and punk rock movements.
PublicSource’s foray into zine publication is in the spirit of these previous movements, but also brings with it a reaction to the digiral culture of our day. Halle Stockton on the rationale:
We intentionally chose the zine format: a small, printed publication you can hold, flip through, pass to a friend or tuck into your bag. It’s low-tech and high-touch. It slows you down just a little. It doesn’t ping or scroll. And it doesn’t require an algorithm to find its audience.
There’s something profound in Stockton’s phrase “high-touch.” The tactile experience of paper creates engagement that’s very different from media that’s mediated through a glass screen. The physical act of flipping pages, the inability to hyperlink away to endless distractions, the constraint of finite space – these aren’t limitations. They’re features. They force both writer and reader into a more intentional relationship with the stories.
I think this is an interesting move for a media outlet like PublicSource. Journalism needs to become more local. It needs to connect with people on the issues that directly impact them, their neighbors and their neighborhoods. It’s smart PublicSource considers the zine project to be one element of a broader strategy to “inform and inspire the Pittsburgh region through the power of deep, independent journalism,” because the artisanal nature of the format does raise questions about scalability.
While most of our information these days arrives through algorithmic feeds and endless scroll, there’s something quietly revolutionary about a folded piece of paper that exists entirely outside that system. PublicSource’s zine experiment reminds us that sometimes the most innovative approach is also the most ancient one: putting words on paper and handing them directly to your neighbors.
Whether this model can scale remains to be seen, but perhaps that’s missing the point. Zines were never about scale – they were and continue to be about connection, community, and the radical idea that everyone has a story worth telling. Maybe what modern journalism needs isn’t more reach, but more touch.
Greg Storey on the binary nature of AI discourse these days:
The assumption that tools passively rewire us, no matter our intent, no matter our context, no matter our discipline, is reductive at best and infantilizing at worst.
Worth a read. This is more nuanced than AI is evil / AI is the future.
How I Used AI Today
I fed Claude some examples of bi-weekly stakeholder updates for products I previously managed. I then asked it to learn the format, understand the tone of the writing, and help me draft a first installment for a new initiative I’m leading. We chatted for a few minutes about the voice I desired, recent progress by the team, and the health of the project. After I provided adequate context, Claude generated a draft for me to review. The initial version was very good and only required a few copy and formatting edits. I was happy with the result and it saved me about an hour this morning.
Note: This post is the first in an ongoing series called How I Used AI Today, inspired by friend and former colleague Beck Tench who does something similar over on LinkedIn. I’m starting to believe the thinking and narrative around generative AI is becoming too binary. The intent of this series is to keep me publicly honest and intellectually responsible with my use of this emerging technology.
It pains me The Center for Humane Technology posted this statement in opposition to the state moratorium on AI legislation on their Substack, but it is a good statement, so I’m sharing.
A 10-year moratorium on state action fundamentally misunderstands the speed at which this technology is being developed and deployed, and the ways our governance institutions need to adapt to meet this moment.
Remember where we were just a year ago with respect to AI. A decade-long moratorium on regulating this grift is not only insane, but it’s dangerous for IP, the environment and worker’s rights.
Let’s not let all the good the internet has given us over the years be overshadowed by keyboard warriors with virtual beer muscles who’d never say to our face what they type from behind a screen. There is still positivity online. Find it. Celebrate it. Share it. Let’s be the web we need right now.
Protocols as Pillars
The social web is at an inflection point. After years of centralized platforms dominating our digital lives, we’re witnessing a resurgence of alternatives built on open protocols. I believe this is something to celebrate, yet I’ve noticed a recent rift of technologists, developers, and early adopters engaging in debates about which approach is more “pure” or “truly open.”
The Mastodon/ActivityPub camp points to federation and existing implementation. The Bluesky/AT Protocol proponents highlight architectural advantages and planned interoperability. They’re both right and each side has compelling arguments, but they miss a fundamental truth: the web was never meant to be a monoculture.
The early web thrived because it wasn’t beholden to a single implementation or approach. HTTP, HTML, RSS and other foundational web technologies weren’t prescriptive about how they should be implemented. They simply defined interfaces that allowed different systems to communicate. This protocol-first approach created a healthy ecosystem where experimentation was encouraged and diversity was a strength, not a liability.
If today’s web is built in the spirit of the web we were given by its creators, platforms simply shouldn’t matter. Protocols should.
When Tim Berners-Lee gave us the web, he didn’t dictate which software to use or which browser was the “true” implementation. Instead, he offered protocols that allowed for interoperability while encouraging innovation at the edges. The result was a renaissance that transformed human communication. The web we knew and loved.
The challenge we face today isn’t deciding which social platform is more ideologically pure. It’s building systems that return agency, privacy and control to users while maintaining the convenience and network effects that drew people to centralized platforms in the first place.
This isn’t a zero-sum game where one protocol must “win” while others fade away. Let’s take email as an example. Email has thrived for decades with multiple protocols working in concert. Different implementations serve different needs, and the ecosystem is stronger for it.
The real metric of success shouldn’t be which protocol gains dominant market share, but whether users regain control over their digital identities and social connections. Can I own my data? Can I choose which clients I use to access the network? Can I move between providers without losing my social graph? These questions matter far more than whether a particular implementation uses federated servers or a distributed approach.
As someone who’s been thinking about the intersection of technology and human experience for years, I’ve come to believe that technical debates often obscure the more important human questions. In reality normies don’t care whether their social media runs on ActivityPub or AT Protocol — they care about connecting with friends, sharing ideas, and being part of communities.
Perhaps what frustrates me most about the current discourse is how it forces people to choose sides in a battle that shouldn’t exist. The brilliant minds crafting today’s open web are wasting energy fighting each other rather than working together to build alternatives to the centralized offerings from big tech.
What if, instead, we embraced a both/and mindset? What if Mastodon/ActivityPub and Bluesky/AT Protocol were seen as complementary approaches, each with strengths and weaknesses, each contributing to a richer, more resilient social web?
It’s already this way for me. By leveraging the POSSE (Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere) philosophy via Micro.blog, I am able to post & reply on both Mastodon/Fediverse & Bluesky without ever seeing or touching either platform. Because the underlying protocols for each are well architected and documented, Micro.blog’s creator Manton Reece can build his platform above their protocols. The Ghost blogging platform is heading this direction too. This is the future.
The path forward isn’t choosing between competing visions of openness. It’s embracing the plurality of approaches while insisting on core values of user agency, data ownership, and interoperability. In that spirit, let’s redirect our energy from debating protocols to building the web we want to see — one that’s truly open to everyone, regardless of which particular technical approach gets us there.
Seth Godin writing on AI’s inability to lie:
AI is a tool, and judgment, for the foreseeable future, remains our job. It doesn’t matter how cool your hammer is, it’s still on you to decide which nails need hammering.
I believe this rationale can be extended beyond AI, to most things in life.
Andy Cush in Hearing Things on quitting artist-abusing platforms like Spotify:
Music just sounds better when you’re not streaming it. Not only because the audio quality is often literally higher, but because you’re forging a connection with what you’re hearing that’s strengthened by your choices.
Like most emerging tech throughout history, GenAI promises to save time & create efficiency. But at what cost?
The pitch is freedom through automation, but the grift is capitalism probing new corners of our lives, optimizing us for more output.
The hamster wheel’s new, but we’re still running.
For my money, Joan Westenberg is publishing some of the most poignant writing on the internet these days. From How Small Networks Build Stronger Ideas:
The best ideation networks are asymmetric. They aren’t little echo chambers. They’re cognitively and temperamentally diverse. They combine the formal and the chaotic. The spreadsheet brain and the poetry brain. The person who reads footnotes and the one who interrupts with metaphors. You want disagreement. You want stakes. You want someone who’s willing to say: this doesn’t hold.
Joan writes the kind of posts where you begin nodding with each new paragraph and by the end you’re saying to yourself: F*ck Yeah. I’m not sure how Joan writes with such volume and consistency, but I’ll take it. I look forward to each new post that hits my RSS feed reader.
Jamie Thingelstad in Blogging is a Gift:
Who is this for? You. Yourself. Your family. Your friends. Your friend’s friends. Your neighborhood. And they can have it whenever they want. As a gift. A gift from you to them. Not a gift to be measured in engagement, but instead as a body of work. A gift to the web, which is a gift to people.
This is exactly how I’ve been thinking about my site lately, and one of the reasons I’ve been importing extremely old posts from my previous online spaces into the archive here. For posterity. For legacy. To create a document of a life (hopefully) well lived.
In Pursuit of Ordinary
In The Ordinary Sacred, Joan Westenberg examines the alternative to a hyper-connected and ultra-performative lifestyle:
We live under systems—economic, cultural, digital—that demand we strive to be impressive. Inspirational. Aspirational. Permanently visible. Permanently performing. Eternally, achingly unsatisfied. We’re trained to ask, before doing anything: Will this make good content? Will this signal something useful? Will this get me closer to who I’m “supposed” to be?
I feel this sentiment in my bones. In my core. It’s a tension I feel pulling at me in surprising moments. Joan’s piece is a longer read, but worthy and relevant one – for me, and I suppose some of you who think similarly about digital culture.
A thoughtful post (as always) from Naz about the importance of carving out your own digital space:
I don’t need to be in a walled garden but I’d love to have you over at my place.
This sentiment is exactly how I’m feeling these days. Fewer, richer interactions in a space that’s built on my terms. I can shut the door and draw the shades if I need privacy, or leave the door open and roll out the welcome mat if I feel like being social.
Like Naz, I’m really interested to explore the artisanal web and I’d love swing by your place if you’ll have me. I’ll bring baked goods.
The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council will begin serving AI slop to their patrons via a customer service chatbot and auto-generated events calendar. This is a bad look for an organization whose mission is to grow “a more resourced, connected, and informed arts sector, empowering artists and arts organizations throughout Southwestern PA.”
Flow, Stock and the Open Web
Fifteen years ago, one of my favorite writers Robin Sloan wrote about the concept of “stock and flow” as they relate to digital media. His metaphor, borrowed from economics, distinguished between the ephemeral stream of updates (flow) and the durable lasting content (stock) that builds value over time. I stumbled upon this post again this week, probably through a bit of Mastodon flow, and reading it among today’s modern context feels both prescient and incomplete – prescient because Sloan astutely identifies the emerging tension between immediate engagement and lasting value, and incomplete in that he couldn’t have predicted how dramatically over the coming decade the pendulum would swing toward flow.
The intervening years have seen the rise and dominance of algorithms, short-form video, and endless streams of ephemeral content. These are the feeds we come to know and love1 . We’ve optimized our digital lives for flow to an extent that would have been hard to imagine in 2010. The “treadmill” Sloan described has become a high-speed conveyor belt, perpetually delivering new content while whisking away anything more than a few hours old.
I’ve noticed something interesting happening, though. As our digital lives have become increasingly dominated by flow, there seems to be a growing hunger for stock – for content with permanence, depth, and lasting value. You can see it. You can feel it. I don’t think it’s just a notion of nostalgia from elder millennials like myself; it’s an emerging & collective awareness that the endless streams often leave us feeling empty and disconnected from what matters. Even my Gen-Z kids tell me this.
In my mind, the open web is the natural home for stock media. While social platforms optimize for ’engagement’ (read: time spent scrolling) and viral spread, the open IndieWeb creates space for content that develops and appreciates over time. Take this post as an example. It’s referencing a blog post from 15 years ago! When you own your platform, you’re free from the tyranny of flow. Your words can find their audience through myriad entry points, through intentional discovery, through the slow build of genuine connection rather than viral mechanics.
This matters because stock isn’t just about content strategy – it’s about how we think, how we create, and how we build understanding over time. When everything is flow, we lose the ability to develop ideas fully, to let thoughts mature and evolve. We sacrifice depth for immediacy, wisdom for novelty.
The open web provides the much needed infrastructure for digital permanence. Through evergreen protocols like hyperlinks and technologies like RSS, we can create connections between pieces of stock content that grow stronger over time. Unlike social platforms where old content effectively disappears, the open web allows ideas to find new audiences months or years after publication.
Now, we can’t reject flow entirely. As Sloan noted as early as 2010, we need both. But these times call for us to consciously rebalance. We need to recognize that some ideas need time to develop and that some conversations are worth having at a human pace rather than an algorithmic one.
I’ve personally experienced this rebalancing since moving my writing to this self-hosted corner of the internet. Free from the pressure to feed the algorithm, I find myself thinking differently about what I create. I’m more willing to let ideas develop over time, to revisit and refine thoughts, to build a body of work that has coherence and permanence.
The economics of stock and flow have shifted too. While flow still dominates attention economy, I think stock increasingly drives genuine interest and lasting value. In a world of generative AI, thoughtful, accurate, nuanced and human-created stock content has (and will) become more valuable, not less.
I believe we are entering a renaissance of stock media on the open web. As more people grow weary of the endless scroll, I think they’ll seek out spaces for deeper engagement and lasting connection. The infrastructure exists – through the basic building blocks of the open web. What’s needed now is a shift in how we think about creation and consumption.
Sloan was right about the importance of balancing stock and flow. What he couldn’t have predicted was how corporate flow would have evolved over those years. He also couldn’t have predicted how the open web would persist over the decades as a natural home for stock, providing both the technical infrastructure and the cultural space for media that endures.
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And by ’love’ I actually mean ‘hate.’ ↩︎
Super cool! Counterforce has published a punk rock guide to Mastodon & the Fediverse. IMO the Fedi is so tightly aligned to the punk / hardcore / underground ethos and I’m surprised there isn’t more of a punk community established. Maybe this is a start.