From theDumpster Fire
A curated collection of the best things on the internet this week — reads, watches, listens, poetry, letters, and the marginalia we refuse to let the algorithm bury.
Small Fires
Every week I fall down a rabbit hole. This week it was about the people who still make things by hand on the internet — the ones maintaining personal sites, writing newsletters to 200 people, recording podcasts in their closets. The ones who refuse to optimize for engagement.
There’s a term for what they do but I can’t remember it. It’s not “content creation” because that implies the existence of an algorithm to feed. It’s something older. Something that predates the feed.
The internet was supposed to be a library. We turned it into a slot machine.
THIS.This issue is about the small fires — the people and projects that keep the internet worth visiting. Some of them are old. Some are brand new. All of them made me feel something, which is increasingly rare and therefore increasingly valuable.
The Internet’s Original Sin
It is not the advertising model that corrupted the internet. It’s the advertising model that was corrupted by the internet’s scale. When you can reach a billion people for free, the only way to get paid is to hold their attention hostage. This is how we ended up with an entire economy built on interruption.
This essay changed how I think about why the web feels the way it does. Not a rant — a diagnosis.
The Web We Lost
A eulogy and a rallying cry, all at once.
Things That Made the Internet Great Are Disappearing
Geocities, webrings, guestbooks — remember?
The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t
The best argument I’ve heard for why making things still matters, even when no one’s watching.
The Lost Art of the Hyperlink
A love letter to the link. Remember when clicking felt like exploring?
What Is a Library For?
Rewilding the Internet
What if we treated the web like an ecosystem instead of a factory?
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves. yes.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. !!!
Dear Eva, It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind. You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say “Fuck You” to the world once in a while. You have every right to.
Stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out. Stop it and just DO.
This letter changed everything for me. Read it when you’re stuck. Read it when you’re afraid. Read it when you’ve forgotten why you started.
— B.
The average webpage now weighs 2.5MB. The entire text of Moby Dick is 1.2MB. We have lost the plot.
observation ↗Someone made a font from their grandmother’s handwriting so she’d never disappear completely.
found objectI miss webrings. I miss not knowing where a link would take me. I miss the internet before it was optimized.
nostalgiaBookmarks are a garden you never tend. 2,000 saved links, 12 revisited. We hoard URLs like they’re going extinct.
observationFound a website from 1997. Still works. Still loads in under a second. Still says exactly what it needs to.
artifactThe Wayback Machine runs on donations and hope. If you’ve never donated, now would be good.
reminder ↗“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.”
“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.”
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”