2025-04-18 19:00:00
This is the 86th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Jeremy Keith and his blog, adactio.com
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My name is Jeremy Keith. I’m from Ireland. Cork, like. Now I live in Brighton on the south coast of England.
I play traditional Irish music on the mandolin. I also play bouzouki in the indie rock band Salter Cane.
I also make websites. I made a community website all about traditional Irish music that’s been going for decades. It’s called The Session.
Back in 2005 I co-founded a design agency called Clearleft. It’s still going strong twenty years later (I mean, as strong as any agency can be going in these volatile times).
Oh, and I’ve written some nerdy books about making websites. The one I’m most proud of is called Resilient Web Design.
I was living in Freiburg in southern Germany in the 1990s. That’s when I started making websites. My first ever website was for a band I was playing in at the time. My second ever website was for someone else’s band. Then I figured I should have my own website.
I didn’t want the domain name to be in German but I also didn’t want it to be in English. So I got adactio.com.
To begin with, it wasn’t a blog. It was more of a portfolio-type professional site. Although if you look at it now, it looks anything other than professional. Would ya look at that—the frameset still works!
Anyway, after moving to Brighton at the beginning of the 21st century, I decided I wanted to have one of those blogs that all the cool kids had. I thought I was very, very late to the game. This was in November 2001. That’s when I started my blog, though I just called it (and continue to call it) a journal.
Sometimes a thing will pop into my head and I’ll blog it straight away. More often, it bounces around inside my skull for a while. Sometimes it’s about spotting connections, like if if I’ve linked to a few different things that have some kind of connective thread, I’ll blog in order to point out the connections.
I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself.
I never write drafts. I just publish. I can always go back and fix any mistakes later. The words are written on the web, not carved in stone.
I mostly just blog from home, sitting at my laptop like I’m doing now. I have no idea whether there’s any connection between physical space and writing. That said, I do like writing on trains.
I use my own hand-rolled hodge-podge of PHP and MySQL that could only very generously be described as a content management system. It works for me. It might not be the most powerful system, but it’s fairly simple. I like having control over everything. If there’s some feature I want, it’s up to me to add it.
So yeah, it’s a nice boring LAMP stack—Linux Apache MySQL PHP. It’s currently hosted on Digital Ocean. I use DNSimple for all the DNS stuff and Fastmail for my email. I like keeping those things separate so that I don’t have a single point of failure.
I realise this all makes me sound kind of paranoid, but when you’ve been making websites for as long as I have, you come to understand that you can’t rely on anything sticking around in the long term so a certain amount of paranoia is justified.
I’m not sure. I’m not entirely comfortable about using a database. It feels more fragile than just having static files. But I do cache the blog posts as static HTML too, so I’m not entirely reliant on the database. And having a database allows me to do fun relational stuff like search.
If I were starting from scratch, I probably wouldn’t end up making the same codebase I’ve got now, but I almost certainly would still be aiming to keep it as simple as possible. Cleverness isn’t good for code in the long term.
I’ve got hosting costs but that’s pretty much it. I don’t make any money from my website.
That Irish traditional music website I mentioned, The Session, that does accept donations to cover the costs. As well as hosting, there’s a newsletter to pay for, and third-party mapping services.
You should absolutely check out Walknotes by Denise Wilton.
It’s about going out in the morning to pick up litter before work. From that simple premise you get some of the most beautiful writing on the web. Every week there’s a sentence that just stops me in my tracks. I love it.
We wife, Jessica Spengler, also has a wonderful blog, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?
You know I mentioned that The Session is funded by donations? Well, actually, this month—April 2025—any donations go towards funding something different; bursary sponsorship places for young musicians to attend workshops at the Belfest Trad Fest who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go:
So if you’ve ever liked something I’ve written on my blog, you can thank me by contributing a little something to that.
Cheers,
Jeremy
This was the 86th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Jeremy. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.
Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung (RSS) — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf (RSS) — Prabash Livera — BinaryDigit (RSS) — Radek Kozieł (RSS) — Marcus Richardson — Emily Moran Barwick (RSS) — Zach Barocas (RSS) — Gosha (RSS) — Ruben Arakelyan (RSS) — Manton Reece (RSS) — Silvano Stralla (RSS) — Mario Figueroa — Benjamin Chait (RSS) — Cai Wingfield
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2025-04-12 16:45:00
I didn’t plan to start working on a new side project and yet, here we are. Back in the summer of 2023 when I had the idea for People and Blogs and I purchased the peopleandblogs.com domain name I said to myself “This is the last domain I’m gonna buy for a side project”.
Fast forward roughly a year and a half and I get an email from the always lovely Ray asking me if I was interested in becoming the new owner and custodian of his blogroll.org. I couldn’t pass on the opportunity. As you know, I am very into blogging and personal sites because I truly believe those are the antidote to the current awful state of the web. I started the P&B series because I wanted to help people connect with one another, facilitate discovery, and encourage more people to get back into blogging. That is because I believe that if you have something worth sharing, it’s better to do it on a site you control, rather than on social media. And blogroll.org, as a project, is very much aligned with that goal which is why I immediately said yes to Ray.
It took me a while to code a new version of the site and move everything from WordPress to Kirby but the new version is finally online.
I have to say that I’m quite pleased with this new version. It’s a lot more colourful than the sites I usually make but that tracks with the way my life is changing. I’m starting to get a bit tired of all this black and white and colours feel a lot more playful. The site is set in Sofia Pro and as mentioned runs on the latest Kirby version. It’s a V1, many features are missing and there are a lot of entries in my to-do list for this project but I’m happy that it’s at least online and people can start submitting sites again.
Like all the other things I’m doing online these days, the site is supported by the kindness of friends and strangers and if you find projects like this to be valuable and want to contribute you can join them for as little as 1$ a month.
As always if you have comments, feedback or feature requests, you can email me. My inbox is always open.
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2025-04-11 19:00:00
This is the 85th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Jedda and her blog, jeddacp.com
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I’m not the best at writing about / introducing myself… but let me give it a try.
Hey there 👋 My name is Jedda, but I also occasionally go by JCProbably, which is a play on my initials. Due to having a unique-ish name, I sometimes prefer to sign my name as such to avoid being easily searchable.
I was born in Manila, Philippines but left very young. I lived in the Middle East (in my namesake city) for 6 years, before moving to the US. I spent most of my life in the East Coast, before moving to California in 2019.
I am a Product Manager by trade, and honestly can’t imagine myself being anything else. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a writer or photographer, but over the years, I’ve come to realize that I enjoy those passions more as hobbies. I guess the thought of turning them into a job just stopped appealing to me at some point. Now I just do them because I want to.
Outside of the above, I also enjoy reading, cycling, snowboarding (and longboarding), and most recently running. I’m still working on the running part though.
I started blogging in the early 2000s. I never called it blogging back then though. To me, I was just an angsty teenager sharing my words with the world. I was on a lot of different platforms such as TeenOpenDiary, Diaryland, Xanga, LiveJournal, Tumblr (early days), and then eventually Wordpress.
It was on Wordpress that I bought my first blog domain. I was on and off blogging on there for over a decade before I stopped, and eventually let my domain expire for a few years.
Fast forward to 2023. I wanted to start blogging and creating again. I checked on my old domain, and since it was my name, it was still available. I re-purchased it and resurrected jeddacp.me, now known as august morning. After purchasing it, as excited as I was to create again, I had no idea what I wanted to write about. It had been awhile since I wrote publicly, and didn’t feel like I had anything to say. This was when I opted to turn it into a photo blog. A blog primarily made up of photos of my life in California, and just a little bit of writing. This went on for a year inconsistently, before I decided to make another change.
Notes by JCProbably came to be when I was testing out a new blogging platform. It was supposed to be a place to write down random thoughts I had about non-important, and trivial things. I remember writing about my contemplation regarding my online presence (which was non-existent at the time), and thinking that it didn’t really matter because I was just writing things into the void. It was then that I got my first email from someone who stumbled onto my blog and reassured me that I was indeed NOT shouting into the void. As someone who was not all that familiar with the small web or its community, that email meant more to me than I could ever really express. So Lou, thank you.
What was supposed to just be a side blog, Notes became my primary blog when I opted to use it for a month long blogging challenge in May, WeblogPoMo. That challenge pushed me to just write every day. I wrote a little bit about photography, and a lot about life. Although I’m no longer writing daily, I have tried to stay consistent since then.
Writing is my form of therapy. As someone who doesn’t feel comfortable talking with a professional about FEELINGS (yes, in all caps), this is a close second. I write a lot about personal experiences, and how I see the world.
When I write a blog post, I often find myself balancing between sharing too much or too little, but usually lean towards the latter. I think part of it is out of a desire for privacy, and the other part stems from growing up in an environment where talking about feelings was not the norm. When I finish writing, I sometimes have to remind myself that not every post needs to carry a profound lesson, even though most experience may teach something valuable (to me).
I write about my thoughts and feelings, but I’d be lying if I said that I never overthink them. Because I do. All the time. With that said, I don’t think this is limited to blogging. I think I’m just someone who tends to overthink a lot of things.
My ideal creative environment would be a house by the beach, where I could always hear the sound of the waves crashing on the shore. Unfortunately, although my house is near a bay, it’s not close enough to the shore, and the waves are nowhere to be found.
So I guess I do believe that in some ways, my environment does influence my creativity. Although I’ve written posts on my phone in the middle of grocery shopping, I much prefer sitting in my own space at home with my laptop. I also love writing when I’m surrounded by books (like in my home office), as if I am absorbing their words and stories to create my own, and tell my own story.
I have a pretty simple tech stack.
Although I have reasons to keep my photo blog and Notes blog separate, I probably would’ve tried harder to consolidate them into one blog in the beginning.
I don’t really have a lot of ongoing expenses for my blogs. I pay between $11-18/yr each for my 2 domains and I paid a one-time Lifetime subscription for Bear blog for $200.
My blog doesn’t directly generate any revenue. I do occasionally write about a camera I use from a company I work with that earns a small commission through an affiliate link.
There are so, so many amazing individuals I have had the privilege of crossing paths through the stories they share on their blogs. Not surprisingly, a lot of them have since been featured on People & Blogs like Véronique, Annie, and Ava, to name a few.
Here are a few others worth checking out (and would love to see an interview from!)
I also curate a rolling list of posts, blogs, and links that I’ve been enjoying throughout the week. It can be found here on my Postroll, as well as the reasoning behind the project.
Shameless plug: also check out blogroll.club — which has so many awesome independent bloggers listed.
The world can feel overwhelming (and at times uncertain) for a lot of people right now. Take some time to check in on your loved ones. Not just a quick “how are you doing?” but with genuine care and intention. Ask, listen, and hold some space for their feelings. Offer a hug, a few kind words, or just a reminder of how much they mean to you. Tomorrow is not guaranteed, and small gestures of love and support can make a world of difference to some people.
Just remember that not everyone expresses their struggles openly. Some may internalize it, mask it behind a smile, or an “I’m fine.” Try to pay attention to the smaller signs that are easily overlooked, be patient, and remind them that you’re there if they ever need it. Sometimes, just hearing that someone actually cares is enough to lighten the weight they’re carrying.
This was the 85th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Jedda. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.
You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.
Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung (RSS) — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf (RSS) — Prabash Livera — BinaryDigit (RSS) — Radek Kozieł (RSS) — Marcus Richardson — Emily Moran Barwick (RSS) — Zach Barocas (RSS)
If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:
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2025-04-06 21:05:00
Although incredibly annoying because it hits me directly in the face while I'm working at my desk, the sun produces amazing shadows late in the evening this time of the year.
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2025-04-04 19:00:00
This is the 84th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Matt Webb and his blog, interconnected.org
To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.
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I’m Matt. I live in London and grew up on the south coast of the UK in a place called the New Forest. The gag is that it’s not new - it’s 900 years old - and it’s not a forest. When it was founded they chopped all the trees down to hunt deer.
I guess I work in design and technology? I help big companies and new ones have new ideas and bring them to market via my one person studio Acts Not Facts. Previously I co-founded a design consultancy called BERG and then ran a couple of startup accelerators with R/GA Ventures, and a ten thousand years ago co-authored a pop neuroscience book called Mind Hacks.
I’m currently manufacturing a clock that tells the time with a new poem every minute! I made an app that points the way to the centre of the galaxy!
So yeah I am super easily distracted with side projects. I like running (when I’m not injured) and I write a whole bunch.
My blog is called Interconnected and I’ve been blogging there for a little over 25 years.
February 2000. That’s when I started. Though I felt like I was late to the game. Which is... wow. So wrong.
I used to make web toys. Nothing wild by today’s standards but I made this six degrees game called Dirk that anyone could add to. A Douglas Adams reference of course! The strap line was something about exploring the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.
And it got a little bit popular and somebody suggested I should get a domain for it, so I got interconnected.org. That was in 99 I guess?
Then blogger.com got popular and everyone starting blogging. And I prevaricated for a bit because I wanted to roll my own tech to do it, but in the end I started a blog and I needed somewhere to put it so I put it at interconnected.org/home and I’ve been there ever since.
What’s it like to write in the same place for 25 years? I blogged some thoughts on that if you want the blow by blow.
But I will say that, right there at the beginning, it felt transgressive and powerful that it was so easy to publish words and make a little home online. Once upon a time I used to make fanzines and that meant somehow begging access to a photocopier and somehow putting down money to print copies to sell. My eyes were wide when I discovered the web. (And then View Source.)
Like, our little blogs are on the same playing field as the New York Times! That’s what the web meant to me.
Blogging is small-p political again, today. It’s come back round. It’s a statement to put your words in a place where they are not subject to someone else’s algorithm telling you what success looks like; when you blog, your words are not a vote for the values of someone else’s platform.
Even without all of that, blogging has been good to me. We used to meet up, us early bloggers in London, and many of my friends today are friends I made in those early days. And my blog is how I’ve gotten jobs. And new ideas.
Now Interconnected is my public notebook. I think through ideas by writing so it’s part of my practice. I’ve posted something at least weekly for almost 5 years which is a neat milestone. I keep track of that particular streak in the site footer.
Ideas can happen anytime. The thing is to capture them. So I have a folder in a notes app and I’ll tap, tap, tap with my thumbs walking down the street.
Right now I use iA Writer for all my writing. I used Ulysses for many years and I still love it. But I’m trying something different because I have a million words in this app, all my private notes, and I care a lot about longevity i.e. always having access to my data. So, in choosing a notes app, I index on “big folder of Markdown files.”
I browse the ideas list and usually a couple combine and then I turn that into a rough outline. A good time to do that is on the train, or before dinner. I always need to know where to start a post. Then I start writing and never end up where I thought I would.
I do a quick edit before posting. My priority is to publish so I made a list of the mental blocks I create for myself and I work to avoid them. I’m not too diligent, by design. Lots of typos.
A friend once sent me this poem by Charles Bukowski, air and light and time and space.
no baby, if you're going to create
you're going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
(And so on.)
Now I’m no poet (or maybe I am, given the clock I’m making) but I feel the same.
That said if I’m working on a more deliberate essay, or maybe a talk or some client work, I’ll open a bunch of tabs and pull a handful of books from the shelves and put them on the desk next to me, and I don’t look at them but somehow they help. This is a legit psychological thing apparently. I asked a friend about it a few years ago and he said “you gotta prime the latent conceptual space your thoughts move around.”
So that’s what I’m doing, priming the conceptual etc.
ALTHOUGH.
Like I said, everything starts with ideas.
I wouldn’t be able to blog at all if I weren’t writing down ideas.
And the ideas seem to come most when I’m doing something else: walking out to get a sandwich at lunch, going to a gallery, reading a book about something I don’t know anything about, listening to In Our Time (I listen to a lot of In Our Time)...
Typing it, right now, I realise I should prioritise more time and space for those activities. Huh. I should give them more air and light.
Right at the bottom of my blog, right at the bottom of the footer, the last line, there’s a link to the colophon. You’ll find the whole tech stack there.
Because it’s pretty baroque.
I prioritise three things:
All of which takes me to building everything myself. Each post is a Markdown file, and the site is rendered by a small Python app. It’s not quite a static site. I layer co-presence on top which is written in another technology entirely.
And oh my goodness I would not recommend this setup to anyone, not a bit, but it works very well for me.
If I were to start a blog today, I would start an email newsletter. And that would be a mistake.
I lucked into a situation where my words accumulate over time like a personal Memex and I have a small and amazing readership -- seriously, whenever I ask something, whether it’s about something esoteric or even a personal favour, people are so informed and so generous.
I close the loop by running something called Unoffice Hours. I don’t have comments on the blog but I do have a few open calendar slots each week, so I’ve had almost 400 calls over the past few years with readers or people who have otherwise stumbled across Interconnected.
And it all works so well for me, you know?
I don’t make any money out of Interconnected, not directly. But it’s so, so worth it. I don’t how how to put a figure on the value of friends, work, ideas, opportunities and enjoyment I’ve got out of simply “thinking out loud” over the years.
How much does it cost to run? I don’t know if I could quantify that. I pay for a server at Digital Ocean, analytics by Fathom, and email (all posts also go out by email) with Buttondown. But if were to track my time making notes for posts or actually writing them, haha no way, I dread to think.
People should totally make money from their personal blogs if they want to and they can. This arrangement works super well for me.
It’s so hard to recommend blogs without knowing a person! Here are 10 I picked a couple years ago (not all are still going but that’s what archives are for).
There are two people I’d be so keen to hear from.
Darren Shrubsole blogs at LinkMachineGo, which I love. We’re a similar vintage: we’re both London bloggers and he also just hit his blogging silver jubilee. So, how do our experiences overlap? How do they differ?
Lu a.k.a. todepond blogs in a wiki? Blog? Digital garden? Something. They are maybe a year or so into blogging with a combination of insightful-and-getting-the-big-traffic posts and beautiful, personal posts too. Lu isn’t “blogging,” they’re doing their own thing, and it’s electric and done with such clear-sighted self-knowledge, and such ease.
I think I should probably shut up now.
This was the 84th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Matt. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.
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2025-04-04 00:45:00
The year is 2025 and the web is—or at least it appears to be—an awful place to spend time on. Negativity is everywhere, ads are omnipresent, influencers are permeating every single corner, everything is hyper-commercialised, and AI garbage is now unavoidable.
To make things even worse, traditional social media is not getting any better and people are running away from them to find refuge on Mastodon, Bluesky, or one of the countless other weird alternatives that have popped up lately.
Wiki defines the term counterculture like this:
A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behaviour differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores. A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When oppositional forces reach critical mass, countercultures can trigger dramatic cultural changes. Countercultures differ from subcultures.
Countercultures differ from subcultures. The way I see it, the true online counterculture is not to join Mastodon or Bluesky. That’s just a different spice of the rotten experience that’s social media. True online counterculture is rejecting social media altogether. It’s leaving your subreddit and teaming up with a bunch of other people to set up an independent forum, yelling “fuck you to spez” in the process. Counterculture is spending time making zines and sending them out to 10 people across the globe, rather than posting shorts on fucking TikTok. Counterculture is sharing things you’re passionate about not because you plan to make a living out of it but because you believe connecting with other human beings is important. Counterculture is forming online bonds with 20 people you get to know over time, rather than amassing hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.
You either believe that an alternative is possible, and you start actively working towards it, or you roll on your digital side and you metaphorically die.
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