Our Philosophy

Guiding principles

• build simple solutions
• demystify tech
• embrace a minimalist aesthetic
• center accessibility
• model & teach reusable, mappable skills
• build tech that supports content and communications
• build multi-threaded channels of communication
• be agile, adaptive and flexible to meet a rapidly changing world
• build affordable solutions
• be multi-modal: embrace channels that span face-to-face, print, web, email
• share skills
• choose to archive rather than erase
• remember that we are writing history ::: resonate & amplify the now but also record history in the making ::: record stories & shape the narrative
• center text-first in written communications. Images are great. Posters are colorful means to promote events but make it a priority to also provide text information outside the frozen image.
• liberate content: apply formattting & styling & platform specifics as a final part of the publishing process. think of content as data : a reusable core resource
• build libraries not advertising brands
• build hypertext, relational, interlinked information environments that encourage traversal ::: that empower exploration and deep dive opportunities
• encourage open source, creative commons, duplication ::: make it easy for others to copy our content
• touching both the surface content and the meta-structure revealed in the underlying code/markup helps us think
• the visible text and the underlying semantic structure of a document both matter ::: be a web writer
• hypertext writing facilitates a clear declaration of the relationships within a text and between texts
• avoid web builders which so often create code bloat and opaque, inaacessible documents
• keep learning together in a rapidly changing technology landscape with all its promise & its perils

Why do we do this?

We believe the act of reading & sharing information is, and has always been, a revolutionary act.

We resist big tech's:

• takeover of internet search
• subversion of our community discourse
• flooding of our information ecosystem with an AI-generated, confirmation-bias turbo-charged, un-navigatable sea of meaningless, truthless, texts with opaque, undiscoverable origins ::: what people have called our current state of "textmageddon" or the "textpocalypse" (see, for example: Prepare for the Textpocalypse by Matthew Kirschenbaum in a 2023 issue of The Atlantic.

The old-school act of reading, questioning, puzzling, integrating, reflecting and sharing articulate, transparent links to information is one of our superpowers of resistance. We cede it at our peril. It is the relational agency provided by the hyperlink in digital spaces that gives us ladders/bridges to each other and to particular writers/journalists/artists — sources that are being subsumed, consumed, erased by the AI profit machine (see: In a first-of-its-kind decision, an AI company wins a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by authors.

Marking up these content summaries for the web takes a bit of work & reading is arduous. But perhaps these times call for a bit of effort. Standing on street corners holding up signs, writing letters to the editor, having difficult conversations, visioning a better world ::: all of these things take time, energy, courage, dedication. But is easy & fast really the goal? Is ceding our search, reading, writing, conversations to an AI agent so it will take less work/thinking really the point? To read, reflect, grapple, & write roughly/"imperfectly" in our own voice is to be human. These acts are a prayer, a resistance, a persistance, a humble effort, a refusal to be subsumed, consumed, erased.

Documenting links, text, pathways through a torrent of the now is an insistance on remembering ::: making an imprint, an archive, a history. We surrender this to big tech in this age of surveillance capitalism, oligarchies, earth-destroying AI at our peril.

Is this work important in the large scale scheme of things? Perhaps not. But we continue as if it mattered to pay attention to the gifts of independent journalists, artists, writers, organizers, historians ::: to each other in this time of chaos, torrent, and incomprehensible change.