"I collect no personal or contact information. Your intentional choice to discover, bookmark, and revisit this work constitutes its value without feeding surveillance infrastructures or email overload."
~ From the Ethical Commitments section of my site
That's what it is.
It's how I've decided to posture myself on the internet as a creative.
You can hook up the blog portion of the site to an RSS feed reader if you're halfway-clever. But you won't receive anything beyond the content in the blog which, for now and forever, will be purely intellectual, exploratory, and focused on The Problem, eschewing the commercial for others to pursue in their own day and way...
It helps uphold the moral obligations I maintain. It prevents scale and profit from entering the equation. It keeps me writing for the sake of the writing, not an audience, not a subscriber count, not a financial incentive, not a political party or social group or public persona or cultural trend or individual person.
Why it is remains a developing philosophy...
I'm not just trying to be contrarian, I'm just tired of how the internet has morphed over the past decade (and okay, maybe my contrarian nature is a little in play here).
We are fed ads, opinions, and "opportunities" by marketers, pollsters, and scammers. Our inboxes fill to the brim and our tabs overflow from our screens.
We've accepted this relationship to the online world and propagated it ourselves, working in organizations that send impersonal mass-communications to their stakeholders, spreading our own content across platforms, and stirring up engagement with what only returns enragement.
Incentives eat intentions. Every time. If the incentive at play is growth (of followers, emails collected, members), even for a good cause, its pursuit will destroy the best of intentions to remain free of extractive techniques as more, better, and newer become metrics then goals then ideals...
Doubly so with a thing that lives solely online.
The nature of this medium is such that the only feedback is from the medium itself, and this is the cycle I want to avoid.
What if we spent more time creating things for people who have the context to understand us, who choose to follow us, instead of creating for people who have no context to understand us at all, who are fed our work by an algorithm alongside their cluttered feeds and inboxes.
What if we chose to create a niche, a space on the internet unlike any other, that relishes its own anonymity and privacy, and neglects to choose in our place?
// Inspired in part by:
Yancey Strickler's, Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
Seth Godin's, Unleashing the Idea-virus
Jenny Odell's, How to Do Nothing