Dear reader,

»February. Dear all. A sad month,« reads the subject line in the last email I received from my grandparents, my mom’s parents. As usual, they leave the email body empty. The only thing accompanying the subject line is a single A4 PDF containing photos with coloured borders and quirky captions. My grandparents have sent these diary-style digital zines for the past four years, documenting the shifting seasons in their garden, driftwood constructions, and special family occasions. I’m always happy to receive them. This time, though, I cried before opening the email.

On February 21st, my mom passed away.

My grandparents’ letter included a photo from my mom’s funeral with Uno, Ana, and me beside the coffin, and another of my siblings and me around my mom’s bed, taken by her caretaker on February 14th. My mom was exhausted, in pain, and could barely talk, so we moved the dinner table into her bedroom and ate by her side. Before saying goodnight, we listened to a lullaby she used to sing to us as kids. It was touching and felt like a goodbye. Still, I crumbled when my sister, a week later, called to tell me that our mom was dead.

The funeral was at Gilleleje Kirke, the church where my mom had served as a priest for a quarter of a century. The priest who led the funeral was an old friend of my mom. They had known each other since high school, where they worked together on a student magazine. She told how my mom took initiative and followed through. How she opened the church for literature, gathered funds and food for those in need, unfolded the story of the Jews hiding in the church attic, and took the confirmands on week-long walks.

In my grandparents’ letter, there were photos but no captions. That makes sense to me; I’m struggling to describe my mom’s death in words. I borrow from the priest and my grandparents, and retell facts. I’m not yet ready to open the document in my notes app titled »Memories of living while my mom is dying.« Maybe I’m not yet settled on what I feel. Or maybe I’m trying to keep my mom alive in my mind a little longer by avoiding the conclusion, like the book you don’t want to end.

It was my mom’s belief that a funeral should move from dark to bright. I’m certain that she would have loved the symbolism of the first spring flowers, the white snowdrop and the yellow winter aconite, popping up on the day of her funeral after a long and cold winter in Denmark.

February was a sad month. It was also the month when my mom found relief from the unbearable pain she had been fighting for years. She looked so relaxed when I arrived at the chapel. Like her sickness had washed away. She looked young again and at peace. I held her cold hand and felt her presence. She is inside me. I felt her again when I walked along the shore where she lived. The sand was wet and heavy, and the wind came straight in my face. I cried and stretched my arms.

With care,
Kristoffer

𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

Kendal Beynon & Sam Mercer: Connection Established

Kendal Beynon is an artist and researcher. Sam Mercer is an artist, curator and producer. Together they are putting on Connection Established, an exhibition in London that feels like a physical extension of this newsletter.

What is Connection Established?

Connection Established is a love letter and a rabbit hole into alternative spaces online, be that forums and wikis or personal homepages and poetic sites. We’re trying to highlight how DIY and alternative publishing parallels a world of the digital handmade, with a real focus on autonomous infrastructures (Varia & In-Grid), web communities (MelonLand & Neocities) and the vernacular of these spaces, whether that is the visual cues that rule the communities, or the shared lore developed over time. This exhibition shows how experimentation and play can enter our contemporary digital landscape.

Why did you decide to put it on?

There is a growing dissatisfaction with the state of our web. We’re all being watched, algorithms rule our feeds, and frankly, a lot of this content sucks. Connection Established is trying to imagine what the internet could be by showing that there are other ways to approach being online. We return to the original ethos of the internet community, and how there is a shifting percentage of internet users who want to build something non-extractive, that seemed to be prevalent in earlier, unfiltered iterations of our online lives. It could be easy to quickly rule this show as a nostalgia trip, or the idea of going back to a heavily romanticised era of the internet, but in reality it engages with the ideas of autonomy and agency in a landscape that is so fiercely governed by big tech companies and the monopolising infrastructures that exist within them.

Who or what inspired you?

There are a lot of really exciting projects within this alt web space, your own Internet Phone Book being one of them. I grew up with zero restriction around my internet use (it was the early 2000s) and will forever be driven to the so-called ‘weird’ spots online. You can not expect someone who grew up deep diving into ghost sightings and MySpace glitter badges to just denounce all of that. Mix that with a love of zines and tinkering, and you basically have this show.

Connection Established is running until June 7 at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. If you go, please send photos to me.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

Field notes

1.
time—finding. I’m drawn to this personal blog mixing ambient sound recordings with intimate reflections.

2.
Stillness.digital. And this blog by Henry Desroches. Here is a taste: »computer, Show Me Less Like This. show me Parisian streets and their denizens, show me futurist art and central american architecture. show me black forests and crystal pools, steady wildlife and bad poetry and confused yellow cabs. computer, show me the agonies of Men in love!«

3.
IF’s Retrofuturist Roots. I stumbled upon this meta-reflection of Naive Yearly 2024 from someone who has engaged with the online texts. I miss putting this together. If things go well, the next edition will take place in early 2027.

4.
Call for Participation. Artlab (Due, Mar 9), Solar Futures (Due, Mar 15), Cursor Mag (Due, Mar 15), Time to Listen (Due, Mar 15), Research Revival Fund (Due, Mar 18), Permeable Barrier (Due, Mar 22), PIFcamp (Due, Apr 5), Are.na Annual (Due, Apr 20), and Antifreeze (Due, N/A).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar. Folder Poetry Party (Mar 8, NYC), Internet Infrastructure Walking Tour (Mar 8, London), Tech Support (Mar 10, LA), Neocities Coding Night (Mar 17, Rotterdam), Email Debt Forgiveness Day (Mar 31, online), The Web You Want (Apr 17, Amsterdam), Open Hardware Summit (May 23-24, Berlin), Parameter (May 29-30, Ljubljana), and INC Exit Fest (June 24-26, Amsterdam).

𖡼𖤣𖥧𖡼𓋼𖤣𖥧𓋼𓍊

Readers’ Corner

This one was so great: https://personalsit.es/. The idea that “nobody blogs” or has personal sites is so funny! And interviewing Manuel Moreale - he manages Blogroll, which has so many sites, too! Getting back to being curious and finding these sites is so fun! I wrote about it here: https://sethw.xyz/blog/2026/02/17/taste-vs-computers/

— Seth

i am very grateful for your newsletter, if only because i wanted to submit to needlebound and am now reminded that this must happen today, but also for other reasons. sunday mornings often start with a smile now!

— Holly

long-time reader, first-time email-er! i’m writing to share a workshop i’m hosting in brooklyn, ny in two weeks (kristoffer: today!). folder party party (the workshop) will be a play test of prompts and tools for using a computer folder as a gathering place. we’ll use a tool i built that lets you turn a folder of files on your computer into a spatial, rearrangeable website without needing to know any code. i have a few more spots open.

i’m reaching out to audiences who i think will be generous and curious collaborators/users/testers, which is certainly your readership! i’ve been plugging away at this “folder party” tool in a tiny group, and i’m very excited to see how it might grow in a larger setting. i think the whole point of building tools is to do so for/with other people; it’s inherently relational work.

— Lizz

⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏𓂁﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖

Wayside flowers

• The (Searchable) Whole Earth

• HTML Color List

• Link Bouquet

• Booklet Library

• Links Supply

• Depot for Waste Deenactment

• A Map of Us

Send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com.

Dear reader,

The first Moomins book is an unusual children’s story.

Where most kids’ books start with the hero leaving the peaceful home in search of adventure and adolescence, The Great Flood begins with the little Moomins’ family on a journey to find a home—and their dad, who had left them with some tiny, strange creatures. The book was published in 1945, when many families around the world were searching for a home and missing family members.

My mom told me that the author, Tove Jansson, had a remote cabin in the Stockholm archipelago. She would stay there most of the summer, and before she left for the winter, she would fill the place with food, firewood, and other necessities, and leave the door unlocked in case a stranded traveler needed shelter.

It’s worth remembering in the Great Internet Migration away from the gigantic social platforms. In our search for a peaceful home, we might consider something other than building private fortresses to hide in.

With care,
Kristoffer

⋆˚☆˖°⋆｡° ✮˖ ࣪ ⊹⋆.˚

Manuel Moreale: Dealgorithmed

Manuel Moreale is a reasonably competent Italian developer in his mid-30s.

What is Dealgorithmed?

Dealgorithmed is my most recent newsletter, focused on the web as a place where people still get to create, share, express, and just be themselves in ways that are not shaped by social media. It comes out twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. My hope for the newsletter is to recapture some of the fun of the old web and also help people reconnect with parts of the net that are currently forgotten.

Why did you start it?

Mostly frustration and anger. I was fed up with all the people who are constantly repeating that the internet is dead and are linking to the dead internet theory. I know for a fact the internet is far from dead.

I see so much negativity and wasted potential in the way we use the web, while I know it could be a much better place for everyone. It’s easy to feel all doom-and-gloom, but part of me has to stay hopeful, which is why I keep coming up with projects to help people connect with each other in the digital space. I wanted to help people rediscover how lively, weird, and quirky this digital space still is.

How is this shown in the newsletter?

When I started the newsletter, I didn’t have a clear idea in mind of what I wanted it to be (and I still don’t). I just knew I needed to do something. I also didn’t want to impose a right structure from the get-go.

The Mystery Links at the bottom, for example, that’s an idea I had while I was typing the content of the first edition, on January 1st. I’m a fan of random explorations (in the digital and in the real world), and I thought clicking on a random link is a nice way to get a bit of that old “web surfing” feel back.

I’m still debating whether I want a proper online archive for this, because part of me likes the ephemeral nature of newsletters, but I also want people to be able to follow via RSS. So that’s something I need to take care of.

Subscribe to Dealgorithmed. Also make sure to check Manuel’s lovely People and Blogs project.

°‧ 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 ·｡

Field notes

1.
Shelf Life: The Truth Lasts. A hopeful hot take: good products are the ones that last. I’d love for this to be the end of enshittification.

2.
Serif Populism. 7000-word design critique slash meme review by Silvio Lorusso.

3.
Hold the Internet in your hands. An interview with me about the Internet Phone Book. I promise to start talking about Issue Two soon...

4.
Call for Participation. Needlebound (Due, Feb 15), File (Due, Feb 19), IndieCon Travel Grant (Due, Feb 28), re•mediate (Due, N/A), NMWP Annual Unconference (Due, Feb 28), Artlab (Due, Mar 9), Solar Futures (Due, Mar 15), Cursor Mag (Due, Mar 15), Permeable Barrier (Due, Mar 22), and Antifreeze (Due, N/A).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar. Literary Manuals Coding Workshop (Feb 15, London), Teaching Creative Technology (Feb 17, NYC), WordHack (Feb 19, NYC), Cybernetics Library (Feb 21, NYC), Internet Infrastructure Walking Tour (Mar 8, London), The Web You Want (Apr 17, Amsterdam), Open Hardware Summit (May 23-24, Berlin), Parameter (May 29-30, Ljubljana), and INC Exit Fest (June 24-26, Amsterdam).

₍ᐢ. .ᐢ₎ ₊˚⊹♡

Wayside flowers

• Patience Toys

• The 954 most common RGB monitor colors

• A Dictionary of Demons

• How Loud

• Personal Sites

• UK Rail announcements

• Animalist

(•˕ •マ.ᐟ

Readers’ Corner

Inprogress.works is lovely – thanks for sharing it. Also: i love any site that has a solid-colour square as a favicon. it’s just plain nice.

— Cory

wow progress works is super cool!
also, cute intro 🍊

— Elliott

Hi Kristoffer, this is Day Lane, archivist of the Hydrant Directory, etc. I wanted to let you know about a call for submission for a new archival project that I think your audience would appreciate.

The Antifreeze Archive (antifreeze.gallery/) is a project to try to archive all the pieces of paper that are produced by communities in response to federal occupation of American cities. Things like: flyers, posters, Know-Your-Rights cards, ice hotline cards, etc. We’re asking people in American cities to mail in submissions to be preserved for future generations. All the information about contributing to the archive is on the website, antifreeze.gallery/contribute/

— Day

Dear reader,

»Did you write that I like french fries?« asked Uno when we started to talk about this newsletter during yesterday’s dinner.

»No, should I?«

»Yes. You should write everything I like.«

With care,
Kristoffer

⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏𓂁﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖

Connie Liu: Inprogress.works

Connie Liu is an internet surfer who makes websites to propose alternative futures.

What is inprogress.works?

Inprogress.works is a lightweight accountability community and journal for your side projects. Each week you’ll get an email reminder to post your WIP update and get to see your progress through an archive. Creating and making things is important because I believe it’s the surest path to self actualization and engaging with the world. The key aspect that makes it different from other social networks is that you cannot see anyone else’s update post until you post yourself.

Why is making things good for self-actualization?

Creating is an act of friction, it’s not easy to do. To create you have to take all your existing thoughts, connect the dots, and tell a story. Sometimes your thoughts are about yourself and how you feel, other times it’s about what is happening in the world around you and what you think about the way things should be. You’re not just thinking about whether you’ll understand it but if others will too - you have to keep on making choices. Those very choices are based on what draws your attention and who you are. That’s different from when you’re consuming media and are essentially taking in someone else’s thoughts and what they care about. Making choices is an act of self-actualization.

Tell me about why it is important to track your progress with others…

Growing up in a small town, I didn’t think it was possible to practice technology as art until I went online and found the work of so many I admire. I wanted inprogress.works to be a way for people to find each other through a shared joy of making.

Before the algorithm, social media feeds were largely for connecting with your friends. You would see what your friends posted in chronological order and there was an end to the feed. If you wanted to view something related to your interest, you would search it up. Now there isn’t even that option anymore to see a chronological following feed on Instagram, within a scroll you’ll see an ad or suggested post. Maybe in a few you can catch up on what other people have posted.

Even worse is people changing how and what they post specifically for the algorithm and capturing attention. Creating becomes more about metrics - posting dependent on what will drive likes and what will grow followers - than about connection. In that vein, going on social media very much feels like watching television - you are watching the world but you aren’t interacting with it. I wanted to discourage one-way social feeds that are optimized towards the algorithm and monetizing influence. I wanted to create social media where there is mutual participation and posting is incentivized purely for the act itself rather than chasing this game of metrics. I believe the power of social media is in finding each other and that’s how we can stay grounded in the real world and ourselves.

Who or what inspired you?

I’m inspired by special.fish, a small social network/community word processor, it first introduced me to the idea of an alternative way to connect away from the increasingly enshittified platforms today. Beyond that, Retro and Bereal for its focus on documenting life in the moment, Strava for activity-based social media, and of course Are.na which showed me what happens when you build software from your principles. I recommend everyone to start going to Are.na meetups, Wikipedia Jams, and other places where you can meet others who believe in the potential for technology to be more than what we have today - to awaken the human spirit rather than diminish it.

Join inprogress.works and see what happens when you commit to something for a year. You can also leave a note for Connie.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Field notes

1.
How To Start a Permacomputing Collective. The people behind a handful of the active permacomputing groups share notes on how to get started with your local initiative. Permacomputing is an example of actual solarpunk.

2.
Actually Existing Solarpunk. James Bridle writes about the existing possibilities, given that the price of solar panels is just twice that of a wooden fencing sheet of the same size.

3.
Taper #15 : Crossroads. Congratulations to the team behind Taper on the latest edition of their computational poetry journal.

4.
Call for Participation. SFPC Spring 2026 (Due, Feb 9), Parameter (Due, Feb 10), t*issues publishing (Due, Feb 12), Everyoneisagirl (Due, Feb 14), Needlebound (Due, Feb 15), re•mediate (Due, N/A), NMWP Annual Unconference (Due, Feb 28), Solar Futures (Due, Mar 15), Cursor Mag (Due, Mar 15), Permeable Barrier (Due, Mar 22), and IndieCon Travel Grant (Due, N/A).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar. être script (Feb 10, Paris), Permacomputing and Programming (Feb 10, NYC), Pop Up Internet Cafe (Feb 14, SF), Literary Manuals Coding Workshop (Feb 15, London), Teaching Creative Technology (Feb 17, NYC), Cybernetics Library (Feb 21, NYC), Internet Infrastructure Walking Tour (Mar 8, London), The Web You Want (Apr 17, Amsterdam), and Open Hardware Summit (May 23-24, Berlin).

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

Wayside flowers

• Cursor Bar

• How It Wears

• Walkman Land

• The Doll House

• Indieblog Page

• American Prairie

• Library of Juggling

Want more? Read last week’s email. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com.

Dear reader,

Until 1 PM on January 6th, I had a calm start to 2026.

We were already in bed when the fireworks went off at midnight on New Year’s. I woke up Uno, wrapped him in a duvet, and went to the balcony to watch the sky. The first thing we noticed was a giant flying drone LED light show. It was organized by the municipality of Athens, as a less noisy and polluting way, to mark the shift of the calendar year, as defined some 500 years ago.

To me, it felt like the end of the old world. Rather than the drones, I preferred those long, silent, and red fireworks used by ships to signal an emergency. There were a handful of them. I believe they are called ‘Red parachute rockets’. They are critical for sailors, and therefore needs to be replaced annually. In other words, there is some sense to the spectacle, and, according to my grandfather, this is the origin for the fireworks on New Year’s—at least in this hemisphere.

**

In our planning call for the second issue of the Internet Phone Book, Elliott asked me if I had a word for the year. His was <time>, written as an HTML element. I like his word. It makes me think of the prolonged way I walk back from Uno’s school so I can walk up the slopes of the Filopappou Hill and catch the morning sun. It also makes me think of closing the laptop to have lunch with Ana on a random Thursday.

I tell Elliott that I don’t have a word for 2026. I used to do this annually as a wrap-up of my pattern’s post: intention, repetition, and rhythm are some of the past words. If you’d ask me to pick one for 2026, it would likely be ‘personal’, like that year review I don’t want to publish because it gets intimate in a way I no longer feel appropriate to broadcast, and because life is messy and unresolved in the way fears and desires ignore the shifting calendars.

**

So what happened on January 6th?

I blended my left index finger while making a soaked cashew garlic dip to sprinkle on the kale-chips I was preparing for our lunch guests. I don’t understand why my right hand would push the button of the stick blender while the left hand’s finger was tinkering with the paste stuck in the blades, but I immediately knew I had done something stupid, and if not, the red blood made it evident. Our friends still came over, and we had a lovely lunch. Uno found the coin in his cake piece, which is a Greek thing for good luck. The cake is called Vasilopita.

**

Wherever I look, I see the old world’s fireworks: the blended content to keep us entertained and free us from labour, and the brutal use of power. Fortunately, I also see the calm night sky. It’s the new world. The world where the long red tail of the parachute rocket is designed to connect humans in need with help, unlike the spectacle by the drones, where I’m unable to locate the pilots.

The finger? It is okay. I have learned to write with nine fingers while the tenth is healing. I’m sure it will be fine with <time>. See you next week.

With care,
Kristoffer

❀࿐

Mikkel Malmberg: 10er

Mikkel Malmberg makes tools, jokes, and stories from his home in the fifth largest Danish city.

What is 10er?

10er (tenner) is a crowdfunding/monetization platform for creators. Supporters sign up to support creators with X amount per Y thing they release. Like, $1 per podcast episode. If you’re thinking “Like [other service]?”. Yes, sort of like them. But smaller and more focused, and made by me.

Why did you build it?

11 years ago I co-hosted a comedy podcast. A few listeners had asked if they could support us and we had added a PayPal button to the website. Amazingly, surprisingly people clicked it. It was great but also not easy to plan around. We desperately needed new (read: some) gear and money was dripping in but it always arrived in surprise little bumps. We never knew when or how much or if ever again. If instead it was more like a “donation subscription”, we could actually plan around it like regular income.

Crowdfunding had a moment back then. Kickstarter was biiig and still very grass roots. I had been following Jack Conte’s (Patreon CEO) music and videos for a while and was very into the idea of Patreon which was brand new at the time. I almost registered, a few times actually, but it felt like adding another job on top of what we were already doing. Patreon heavily focused on giving supporters more than the content they were supporting. I wanted something simpler.

Being a programmer, an optimistically naive one, and empowered by my new Stripe account, I thought: “I can just build it myself.” So I did, over a week’s time. We announced and fans started signing up. A friend asked if he could have the same for his project and so 10er became a platform.

What’s it like running the project a decade later?

I’ve been running 10er for 11 years now and for most of that time as a side project. The core model and premise hasn’t changed much and the day-to-day doesn’t require much maintenance. A few years back I hired someone part-time to help with customer service and social media so that I could forget 10er for days or a few weeks without the whole thing falling apart. In 2025 I brought on my wife for that position and she’s been great.

I share a bunch of numbers publicly from 10er, including revenue, and if you look at that graph, it just goes steadily upwards and to the right. What’s not shown are all the mistakes and small wins, new features and new competitors. It’s been a wonderful little project to run. Creators are happy to be paid for their hard work, supporters are happy that they have an easy, reliable way to give back.

Kristoffer says: Visit 10er.com or explore Mikkel’s other work and writing on his personal website. And a final note from me: I’d love to feature more of these internet mom-and-pop shops, so write to me if you know any or have your own. I believe these small, personal companies are a very tangible way to make the internet better.

𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼

Field notes

1.
The Computational Poet. I regularly feature Alicia Guo’s work, so it’s a pleasure to include a longer interview with her about her practice and research into language, poetry, and AI. My only objection is that I wish Alicia had been asked to elaborate on her comment about humans who want to control the output of generative work. But maybe that’s for another interview?

2.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto. This was shared widely, and I found myself nodding in agreement until I reached hyper-personalisation. Whenever I read ‘hyper-personalized,’ I can’t stop thinking about ‘hyper-individualized,’ which is a quality I believe goes against most of the experiences I have had of resonance. Few good things come from staring at ourselves in the mirror too often or for too long.

3.
Open your laptop! The creatives designing a more inspiring internet. An article in It’s Nice That featuring yours truly, and many of the Naive Weekly regulars like Daniel Murray and Spencer Chang.

4.
Call for Participation. SFPC Spring 2026 (Due, Feb 9), Parameter (Due, Feb 10), t*issues publishing (Due, Feb 12), Everyoneisagirl (Due, Feb 14), Needlebound (Due, Feb 15), re•mediate (Due, N/A), NMWP Annual Unconference (Due, Feb 28), and Solar Futures (Due, Mar 15),

5.
Poetic Web Calendar. The Origin of the Word (London, Feb 2), The Origin of the Word (Feb 7, Amsterdam), Pop Up Internet Cafe (Feb 14, SF), Teaching Creative Technology (Feb 17, NYC), Internet Infrastructure Walking Tour (Mar 8, London), The Web You Want (Apr 17, Amsterdam), and Open Hardware Summit (May 23-24, Berlin).

────୨ৎ────

Wayside flowers

• The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

• Bug Grid

• Intertapes

• San Francisco Graffiti

• Nightscapes

• Bird Radio

• 2026 Greetings

Last email was sent to 5031 inboxes. Fifteen people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

Hello. It’s me Kristoffer.
How are you?
What’s new?
Do you have a favourite link? Bookmark? Site? Tool?
Where are you going? What are you reading? Watching? Listening to?

Please tell me in replies (kristoffer@naiveweekly.com).

Also, before I forget, it is worth mentioning that the next time you hear from me will be on January 4th, when I’ll send my annual reflection post. Paid subscriptions are paused until then.

With care,
Kristoffer

⋆꙳•❅‧*₊⋆☃︎‧*❆₊⋆

Maisa Imamović: Maisa in Webland

Maisa Imamović is a researcher, web designer/developer, and experimental educator who now wrote a book called Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies.

What is Maisa in Webland?

Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies examines contemporary web design traps, their consequences on the user, and how creative technologists counter these conditions through inventive online practices. UX Destinies traces how behaviors like stalking, teasing, and ghosting have become central to survival, care, and belonging in capitalist society. Driven by the urge to resist designs that script these destinies, Maisa (me) in Webland follows conversations with Maisa’s (my) digital sages, who share methods for thriving online, while also confronting the elephants in the room — automation and the precarity of being a woman — revealing how capitalist forces continue to erode even the little hope these practices spark.

Why did you write it?

Migrating from the Netherlands to the US during my research made clear how internet debates and practices differ culturally and politically here and there. Internet liberation feels more tangible in Europe, where cultural funding supports experimentation; in the US — reliant on private funding or none at all — it’s more desired than doable. There is simply scarce cultural funding in the US, pushing many creatives to rely on private money, and weird social relationships that come with it. If you don’t want to depend on cybersecurity-bro philanthropy, academia is still currently one of the only places where creative technologists can access the resources needed to pursue larger projects that can be impactful. Beyond teaching, those purposes can expand into establishing academic labs or using the resources provided by the academic institutions to gradually develop an independent studio practice that bends and challenges the corporate vision for the internet. At the same time, academia is competitive and, due to its political issues, especially after Trump’s re-election, it sucks right now. The majority will say that, especially those who are not in it. The emerging right-wing obsession with automation as a stand-in for “autonomy” casts a bleak shadow over education. Under these conditions, many talented, experimental internet thinkers and practitioners drift toward private capital. And we all know how much ideas can suffer from this. Technically, the full potential rarely materializes and projects often end up looking like an existing product, but now also made by artists. In Europe, where mere geography is not rich enough for the same scale of political extremism to proliferate and where there is actually plenty more cultural funding, creatives have more agency to shape their social dynamics and forms of their ideas. Forms are way more experimental and professionally bold — the same kind that in the US, I’d only see pursued by undergraduate students. They’d never dare pursue those ideas on a bigger scale and beyond the classroom. I sometimes miss the days when I complained about Dutch cultural funding for constraining my ideas. I still think that there are legit limitations to an extent, but at least it offers the chance to fail, recalibrate, and move on to the next—possibly better—project without as many financial or social consequences. In any case, these conditions reshape what liberation means, a nuance often missing in internet discourse. Both systems are limiting in their own ways, and both can be liberating if we pay closer attention to the contexts they emerge from. The methods I explore in my book confront these constraints and conditions, searching for the spaces where liberation can still take shape.

Beyond countering internet cynicism with practical ways to “shut up and participate in building the web,” I also wanted to make media theory accessible to younger generations so that they’re still historically informed. Understanding the evolution of the web — especially the 90s era when everyone online participated in building the web — can spark new experiments and theories for the contemporary web, the not so exciting one. By media theory, I don’t only mean reading the canonical texts by the Benjamins of the world. I also mean theory-ing: treating theory as something playful, grounded in personal observation. Anyone who’s ever been online will get excited about thinking about their favorite and least favorite websites, online experiences, and online wishes - if you ask them. But theory and theorizing alone is not enough. Left on its own, it often breeds doomers who opt out of platforms—and, eventually, out of social life altogether—proving only how deeply social media companies have defined what “social” means both online and offline. As an educator, my goal in asking these questions is ultimately to guide students toward critical coding practices. Coding while being critical creates new kinds of online experiences, whether lasting or ephemeral. These moments show that there’s more to life than isolation, and more to the internet than the dominant corporate vision. The internet is still so young!

Lastly, receiving Dutch funding — to turn my research into a book — just as Trump was elected and censorship intensified made the project feel urgent, and far safer to pursue as a book than online activism. As an opinionated PhD candidate on an F-1 visa in the US, I’m more cautious than I’ve ever been as a user.

Who or what inspired you?

Literally all the digital sages in this book!! Alex Quicho, Amad Ansari, Anja Groten, Bogna Konior, Chia Amisola, Daniel Shiffman, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kristoffer Tjalve, Lilian Stolk, Marie Williams Chant, Maya Man, Nadia Piet, Olia Lialina, Rachel Rose O’Leary, Sarah Friend, Tara McPherson, Theo Ellin Ballew, Tiffany Shlain, Valerie Fuchs, Warren Sack. I shouldn’t forget Terry A. Davis and Ashley Jones :) AND my passion for coding AND my desire to preserve coding practices amidst automation <3

You can pre-order Maisa’s book.

𖠰𐂂𖣂𖢔𖠋𓍄𓇥𓋜𓐬

Field notes

1.
»People will say, I just post for myself, which is a lie. They say that because they feel it’s morally better to be that way, and I really disagree with that. It’s okay to feel like you’re performing and even want to perform a bit. That’s not evil. It’s a condition of living. I’ve adopted a [Erving] Goffman-esque philosophy of performance online. Everything is a performance.«

— Maya Man in The Choreography of Posting Online.

2.
Web Curios. The annual reminder to ditch this newsletter and read Matt Muir’s weekly internet canon.

3.
Call for Participation: Orbital Studies Magazine (Dec 10), MissVideo4u (Dec 15), Open Hardware Summit (Dec 21), and Phrack 73 (2026).

4.
Poetic Web Calendar: River Computer (Dec 1, SF), Chinatown JS (Dec 2, NYC), presentation partiii (Dec 3, Online), More than a book club (Dec 4, CPH), Are.na Annual (Dec 12, NYC), Rasuk (Dec 12, NYC), Press Play (Dec 12-13, NYC), Prophecy (Dec 13, SF), and The Web You Want (Apr 17, Amsterdam).

⋆꙳•̩̩͙❅*̩̩͙‧͙ ‧͙*̩̩͙❆ ͙͛ ˚₊⋆

Wayside flowers

• The Nicest Place on the Internet

• Birdfeed Live

• Book Recommendations

• Little Worlds

• Pal

• Searching the World

• Cool S

Last email was sent to 5029 inboxes. Fifteen people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Do you sometimes feel like you have done enough talking? That’s me lately. Nevertheless, thanks for reading and listening. It means a lot that you care.

Dear reader,

I’m a little late with today’s newsletter. The dark evenings make it hard for me to open the laptop when Uno sleeps. I apologise for this brief introduction. The sun(day) is calling.

With care,
Kristoffer

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

Adina Glickstein: Open Social Network Cookbook

Adina Glickstein is this generation’s Nan Goldin, but for alternative technology communities.

What is the Open Social Network Cookbook?

Last winter, the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado ran the Open Social Incubator, a peer learning initiative that brought together activists, artists, and community-builders from all over the world to explore various kinds of alternative social media platforms and protocols. We were interested in the question of what makes for more democratic and accountable online communities and in the labor, care, and many delicate balancing acts required to sustain such a space.

After 6 months of group discussions, workshops, and reflection, each participant wrote a “recipe” breaking down some of their learnings. The Open Social Network Cookbook is a snapshot of participants’ thought processes – from Mac Andre Arboleda’s dictum on the value of seduction (he cites ‘hacker hotties’ as an essential ingredient) to Kadallah Burrowes’ oral telling of an origin myth collectively fabulated by their pan-African artist collective, ANANSI.

Why did you make it?

We wanted to create a publication of some kind that could disseminate some of the learnings from the incubator, without being too prescriptive or didactic. It was important that the publication wasn’t just piling onto the information overload or succumbing to the “infographic-as-knowledge” logic of our platformed present. In step with the peer learning format of the incubator itself, we were interested in finding a publication format that enabled people to pose questions for future elaboration or invite other tinkerers to build on their work. (Many jokes were made about the possibility of “forking.”)

So a cookbook felt like the right format: recipes are like protocols but they’re also more loose and suggestive. They carry an implicit encouragement to the user to tweak, defer to embodied knowledge and experience, measure from the heart. Cooking is also an area where skills and knowledge are passed down among kin and across generations, which we hope some of the technical skills in the cookbook might also be. Hence, a cookbook was a low-pressure way of collecting some actionable insights while also leaving things open for future experimentation and evolution over time.

Who or what inspired you?

The participants in the incubator were the biggest inspiration. Every single one of them had so much to teach, and with so much spice and style. Nathan Schneider, who directs MEDLab, has this great line in his book Governable Spaces about shifting the ethos of online spaces from “homesteads” (colonialist mindset grounded in the cyber-libertarian imaginary of the digital frontier) to “homeplaces” (spaces of true relational belonging, cf. bell hooks). The desire to equip people to create virtual spaces that feel more like homeplaces was one of the major inspirations for this incubator.

When we first introduced the idea for a publication at one of the group meetings, some of the reference points that Antoinette Kendrick (my co-facilitator and an incredible PhD student working with MEDLab) and I surfaced for “alternative cookbooks” included The Anarchist Cookbook (lol) and The New Women’s Survival Catalog. I tried really hard not to talk about Stewart Brand but we still ended up talking about Stewart Brand. I guess the idea of scalable tools for transformation lingered inside the imaginary of this project.

Much of our work was also underpinned by Black feminist thought – from the aforementioned idea of the “homeplace” to Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” essay guiding discussions about how to make digital spaces that are pleasurable to inhabit. We talked a lot about the idea of “kitchen table politics” as a frame for grassroots organizing, coming out of Black feminism, which also obviously jives with the “cookbook” metaphor.

Download the Open Social Network Cookbook, and remember to read User Error, Adina’s best-of-class internet-column at Spike.

❁✿❀❁✿❀

Field notes

1.
Maya. An interview with Maya, webmaster of her namesake site, maya.land. It is funny to read because we share an overlap in formative references, including Kicks Condor.

2.
Desktops.computer.

3.
»So I was already collecting birdcalls, and I had some in my collection on my bookshelf. When I was looking for a studio, I didn’t want it to be just for my private use. I wanted to make a kind of semi-public, semi-private place, and I wanted to share the space and the resources that I had. In that way, I had to have some sort of prompt for gathering people. I didn’t want the prompt to be too strict or loud or anything, I wanted it to be calm. I wanted to name it less as a business, but more in an intimate or friendly way. I was focusing on the verb “invite,” as you mentioned. I thought that this object fit the most.«

— Jisu Lee in An interview with Jisu Lee on the Seoul-based space Birdcall.

4.
Call for Participation: Send your fridge to oio (N/A), Orbital Studies Magazine (Dec 10), and Open Hardware Summit (Dec 21).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: The Wrong Biennale (Nov 1-ongoing, online), d*sign week (Nov 24-30, Linz), Iterations Online (Nov 27-29, The Hague), Bookmarklet Instruments (Nov 27, online), De-growing Infrastructures (Nov 27, AMS), River Computer (Dec 1, SF), Chinatown JS (Dec 2, NYC), Are.na Annual (Dec 12, NYC), Press Play (Dec 12-13, NYC), and The Web You Want (Apr 17, Amsterdam).

·༻𐫱༺·

Wayside flowers

• How Did I Get Here?

• Traffic Vision Live

• Luddite Style

• Dizzy TV

• What Everyone I Know Wants For Christmas

• Play Phrase

• Anna’s Secret Garden

Last email was sent to 5041 inboxes. Fifteen people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

Uno comes running to Ana, laughing. He asks her to translate “ο μπαμπάς μου είναι το θέμα του αστείου« with her phone. He heard it at school. He knows Ana recognises the Greek sounds, and he knows the phone will turn them into English so his parents can follow along.

It happens often. Whenever we don’t know something, Uno says, »ask your phone”. What’s the weather? Ask your phone. Who is the God of humans? Ask your phone. You see the pattern.

He learned it from us. We check our phones for everything: the time, directions, translations. From the eyes of a five-year-old, the phone is a modern day oracle, a magical object adults consult for answers.

We’ve started telling Uno that the phone is more a finder of things. It gathers answers made by others. The rain forecast comes from someone studying the weather, not from the phone itself. I want Uno to know that knowledge has a source, a place, a labour behind it. That matters even more now, as the phone’s answers slide toward algorithmic predictions, further obscuring the lived places and practices that shape knowledge.

Still, the best solution would be to use the phone less. As the Greek sentence says, »my dad is the butt of the joke.«

With care,
Kristoffer

𖡼𖤣𖥧𖡼𓋼𖤣𖥧𓋼𓍊

R74n

R74n is a collective founded in 2017 creating web-based projects.

What is R74n?

R74n is many things. If you follow the lore, it’s a multiversal entity breaching into our world. But at its core, R74n is a collection of websites and artistic webpages. There isn’t a general theme, but it includes browser games like our most notable Sandboxels and Infinite Chef, useful references like the Copy Paste Dump, and massive silly collections like Hello in Every Way or our Shapes icon set. R74n also does large amounts of archiving work for subjects relevant to our collective and community, and seeks to be omnipresent around the web.

Why did you start it?

Even before R74n, I was creating projects and sharing them with my inner circle. I initially started R74n as a way to share these projects with the public.

Who or what inspired you?

I am constantly inspired by indie websites, new and old. I click links all the time and take in all the little details, such as 88x31 buttons, which I’ve been particularly interested in recently. I am also inspired by gaps in the web’s content that I encounter myself, like the lack of a unit converter that can convert dog years to Minecraft days. The urge to make these large projects even bigger, along with feedback and suggestions from our viewers, keeps me going.

Visit https://r74n.com/

☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆

Field notes

1.
»I think everyone on MelonLand is an oddball to some extent. A lot of the time, people just like having a place where they can be something that they can’t be in regular life.«

— Daniel Murray in Web Craft.

2.
Your Desktop Is An Open World. A short seven-minute video that shows experiments on how to look at the desktop rather than through it. Imagine your desktop as a chessboard, puzzle, or keyboard.

3.
Interview with Joanna Walsh. I’m happy to see a new book written about the (internet) amateurs. The “professional” internet gets enough attention, so it is nice when an author and publisher decide to make a stage for the understory of the web. Without the amateurs, the internet would be a convention hall full of salespeople. Sounds like a nightmare, right?

4.
Call for Participation: SFPC Winter 2026 Application (Nov 17), send your fridge to oio (N/A), and Orbital Studies Magazine (Dec 10).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: The Wrong Biennale (Nov 1-ongoing, online), Crash Course (Nov 10-20, Rotterdam), Tiat 13 (Nov 16, SF), Star Quest (Nov 18, NYC), Wordhack (Nov 20, NYC), d*sign week (Nov 24-30, Linz), Bookmarklet Instruments (Nov 27, online), De-growing Infrastructures (Nov 27, AMS), River Computer (Dec 1, SF), Chinatown JS (Dec 2, NYC), and The Web You Want (Apr 17, Amsterdam).

₊˚✿𑁍.ೃ࿔*:･

Wayside flowers

• Alive Internet Theory

• Restaurants Rip

• Narrative Constellations Showcase

• A Trail Tale

• Has the ai bubble burst yet?

• Clocks

• White Screen Online

Last email was sent to 5046 inboxes. Fifteen people support me with a paid subscription (thank you for the upgrades, Emily & Whitney). You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

Thank you so much for all the kind messages following the last newsletter. Here is a quick Q&A without the questions:

• Yes, I’ll be leaving Substack.

• Yes, I’ll be continuing Naive Weekly.

• Yes, it will take some time.

• Yes, I’m accepting exit meme proposals.

In short, I want Naive Weekly to live on the web and allow for more experimentation with the newsletter itself. Substack feels like a continuation of social media with an increased focus on locking in readers and writers through accounts, apps and »network effects«. This is not what I want for myself, you, or the web.

I’m currently playing around with the new website design. I’ll find a way to share it with you when my thoughts have matured.

With care,
Kristoffer

Ps. wow, there are now 5,000 people receiving this email.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

Arran Lyon and Senka Milutinović: Marginalia

Senka Milutinović is a researcher, writer, and multimedia designer. Arran Lyon is a multidisciplinary coder. Both are a part of the ARK collective.

What is Marginalia?

Marginalia is an annotation and publishing platform that encourages writing in the margins. It takes annotations, footnotes, tangents, and asides, and makes them equally important to the main text. Writings in the margin help us understand texts better, but also find original traces of ideas, similar to how hyperlinks lead us to unexplored resources.

Why did you start it?

We struggled to find adequate tools for collaborative use. The ones that were offered to us were imposed by Big Tech companies and geared towards efficiency and productivity. We needed tools that are suitable for non-linear, messy, playful, entangled and not often recognized knowledge creation that comes with collectivity. This became clear to us during a research fellowship with ARK collective and led us down the rabbit hole of marginal writing, and we decided to make a tool that put the margins at the centre.

Who or what inspired you?

Most notably Marginality as a site of resistance written by bell hooks and the A Feminist Server Manifesto 0.01 from the Feminist Server Summit. Both impacted us to think about Marginalia as a tool that could implement feminist principles, both on a tech and social level. So, for instance, the platform was built to be sustainable and accessible, it’s lightweight, can be self-hosted and the design has accessibility features, legible typography, and customizable parameters.

Design-wise, we celebrate this entangled and collective train of thought that doesn’t always aim for clarity, since this kind of designed clarity often flattens and simplifies. Instead of triumphing the individual author who creates a clear linear narrative, a lot of knowledge with Marginalia is created in dialogue with others, instead of in a vacuum. We made it free and open-source so it can continue evolving with a community that has a use for it.

Visit https://margi-nalia.site/.

𓇢𓆸𓏲𓇬𑁍

Field notes

1.
Personal Business. During the Summer, I started romanticizing family-run businesses. These small shops where people care and know about what they are doing. It’s quite the contrast to the textbook models I was taught in business school. There, the goal is always scale and domination. Maybe it is time to unlearn some of these leftover lessons from modernism? Making a Personal Business, as Charles Brokoski writes, seems aligned with this line of thought.

2.
»I read an article yesterday, stating that on average, people spend 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phones per day.« — Herman Martinus in Smartphones and being present.

3.
Full Days and the Long Walk. The writer Craig Mod is back from one of his long walks through Japan. He reminds us to schedule Full Days—days without internet distraction.

4.
Call for Participation: Mapping the Internet (final call), Experimental Search Engine (N/A), Chinatown JS (N/A), Sybil Residency (Nov 10), SFPC Winter 2026 Application (Nov 17), Orbital Studies Magazine (Dec 10),

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: Esoteric Algorithms (Oct 16-Nov 8, Berlin), The Wrong Biennale (Nov 1-ongoing, online), The Most Evil Computer Ever (Nov 2, SF), README Software Art Festival (Nov 6, hybrid), Debox (Nov 9, online), Crash Course (Nov 10-20, Rotterdam), Are You For Real (Nov 12, online), Next Level (Nov 13-16, Dortmund), What is a file? (Nov 14, Rotterdam), Stupid Hackathon Sweden (Nov 15, Sweden), (De)Growing Infrastructures (Nov 27, AMS), Chinatown JS (Dec 2, NYC), and The Web You Want (Apr 17, Amsterdam).

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

Wayside flowers

• What does my husband look like

• Fantasque Player

• Avocado Ibuprofen Paint

• Space Elevator

• Cute Cars

• Chihuahua Spin

• Hyper Synchronism

Last email was sent to 5019 inboxes. Thirteen people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

I’m a little late with this edition. Roughly 45 minutes if the goal was to send the newsletter at 7AM local time. Or two weeks, if we consider the short unannounced break.

I sometimes wonder if anyone besides me notices when I take a break. Or when the email is delayed? Writing a weekly newsletter is a big thing for the person writing it; even a tiny newsletter like this takes space in the mind and the week. But how about for those receiving it?

I don’t have any specific excuses for my delay, nor do I feel I need to justify skipping weeks. Yet, I increasingly feel that whatever Naive Weekly has become over the past seven years no longer fits with living on Substack. It is time to move out…

With care,
Kristoffer

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

Call for Participation: HTML Review #5

Shelby Wilson and Maxwell Neely-Cohen are the founders and editors of The HTML Review.

What types of submissions are you looking for? And why are you more interested in pieces that have nothing to do with the web or technology?

We look for submissions which make sense in the context of a literary magazine to some degree, but also take advantage of being on the web. Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, essays, graphic storytelling, and experiments are all welcome. Past contributions have included durational works, playable poems, interactive essays, hypertext stories, musical instruments, word terrariums, ASCII memoirs, and all manner of forms we could not have previously imagined.

We love the ultra specific. We often say we are interested in the “web as a medium,” and really want to see that medium used to explore subject matter other than commenting on the medium itself. This isn’t to say a piece can’t explore or critique one’s relationship with technology. Of course you can make a great painting about painting, a great ballet about ballet, or a great website about websites, but we also love it when art takes its gaze outward.

How do you work with accepted proposals? What is the process until publishing the pieces on the first day of Spring?

We meet with each contributor and plan deadlines for each piece depending on its specific needs. Sometimes the process is more focused on story or language, sometimes on code and design. One of the great joys of working on each issue is every one of these interactions is unique. Our goal is always to help give a piece its best possible life.

How do people participate?

For those who would like to contribute:

• Submissions are open from October 1st–November 1st and can be sent to submissions@thehtml.review. Pitches can be a couple of paragraphs explaining the idea and can include visuals or links to a work in progress.

Of course anyone who reads an issue, who shares the work with their friends, is also a crucial participant in the project.

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

Field notes

1.
Becoming Hypertext. A Poetic Web Workshop made by Chia Amisola. Click Site, Browser, and Desktop at the top of your window for each of the classes.

2.
Internet Phone Book in It’s Nice That. We are sold out of the reprint of the phone book. Thank you so much to everyone who bought and shared the book.

3.
Alive Internet Theory.

4.
Call for Participation: Mapping the Internet (Oct 20), Piksel Festival (Oct 23), Experimental Search Engine (N/A), and The HTML Review (Nov 1).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: The Web We’ve Built (Oct 22, Hybrid), New Ways of Seeing (Oct 24-25, Paris), Robot Karaoke (Oct 26, SF), README Software Art Festival (Nov 6, hybrid), Crash Course (Nov 10-20, Rotterdam), Stupid Hackathon Sweden (Nov 15, Sweden), and (De)Growing Infrastructures (Nov 27, AMS).

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

Wayside flowers

• 100 Deep Breaths

• Yamanotes

• WikiAsteroids

• Fall Foliage Map

• Sewing Patterns

• Kiunlo’s Cursor Cave

• Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts

Last email was sent to 4972 inboxes. Thirteen people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a reader named Tiffany. I’m a devoted reader of Tiffany’s work, so the email was a lovely surprise, kinda like bumping into an old friend on the street (except, in this case, it was an old friend I didn’t know I had).

So, Tiffany wrote:

Help me map the internet.

To which I replied:

I’d love to.

But the internet is different for everyone. Your bookmarks aren’t mine. Neither are your search results, social feeds, inboxes, or RSS subscriptions. So instead of drawing the perfect map, we thought it would be better to ask all of you. Not to pin down the internet once and for all, but to collect maps of the many different internets we each call home. Like swapping photos of our bookshelves.

With care,
Kristoffer

𓇢𓆸

Call for Participation: Mapping the Internet

Tiffany N is a tech and culture writer. Today, she comes to you with a simple request: help her map the Internet.

How did you get the idea to map the internet?

In 2009, co-founder of Wired, Kevin Kelly, asked everyone he knew (of all ages, might I add) to submit hand-drawn maps of the internet. He wanted to survey how people were experiencing their then-new age of connectivity. Some drew mind maps, others fashioned arrows into complex webs. My personal favourite was a large infinity sign with a small wooden house parched in the center—a delightfully simple representation of how optimistic we were about the early internet.

Why is it worth mapping the Internet now?

It’s no secret that the internet has changed a lot since 2009. For better or for worse? Depends on who you ask. I’m curious how folks, especially those with more intentional relationships with the web see the internet today. Internet traffic is often aggregated into a few select sites. Algorithms are creating a convergence of culture. The indie web fades in the background of SEOs—where do we find whimsy today?

The final form of this would be something of a collage juxtaposing Kelly’s project in 2009 with maps from today. Has the hope and enthusiasm of the early 2000s persisted in the rise of Big Tech? How did the rise of smartphones alter our fundamental relationships with the web?

How do people participate?

Three simple steps:

1. Draw the internet as you imagine it to be today

2. Indicate where “home” is on the map

3. Send your submissions to tiffany@breakfastatmyhouse.com

Please take any and all creative liberty with this—submissions close by October 20th, 2025.

Final note: Tiffany writes Cyber Celibate, a lovely self-described neo-luddite newsletter exploring the more whimsically low-tech corners of the internet. She has written about chaining her phone to a wall, printed her For You Pages, and hired a carrier pigeon in lieu of texting. You’ll also occasionally see her byline in Wired, Vox, MIT Technology Review, and Vogue.

𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

Field notes

1.
Weird Web October. It’s that time again. Send me your sites and I’ll include some of them during October.

2.
Internet Phone Book. We are down to the last 90 copies.

3.
»If my mom wanted good art on her fridge, she could’ve purchased reprints of works by Vermeer, Lichtenstein, Wyeth, etc. But she didn’t want good art – she wanted my art.« — Taylor Troesh in My website is ugly because I made it.

4.
Call for Participation: Digital Humanities Today: Critical Inquiry with and about the Digital (Sep 30), New Media Open Call (Oct 1), New Platforms Publication (Oct 2), Rhizome Microgrants (Oct 10), Forms of digital publication (Oct 10), and Lullaby Machine (Oct 15).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: HTTPoetics Showcase (Sep 28, Online), Start Up - Sounds (Oct 2, London), Wikigame Jame (Oct 3-5, NYC), Technologies of Solidarity (Oct 10-12, Rotterdam), Extending Poetry through Computation (Oct 10, Online), Triple Canopy Symposium (Oct 10-11, NYC), Peckham Digital (Oct 16-19, London), Softer (Oct 17, AMS), New Platforms (Oct 18, Sthlm), New Ways of Seeing (Oct 24-25, Paris), Stupid Hackathon Sweden (Nov 15, Sweden), and (De)Growing Infrastructures (Nov 27, AMS).

.𖥔 ݁ ˖𓂃.☘︎ ݁˖

Wayside flowers

• Dial-a-Poem

• Straw Dogs

• Community Radio Stations in the US

• Ambienst

• Guardian Haiku

• It’s a Circle

• On the Internet Everybody Knows You Had a Dog

Last email was sent to 4962 inboxes. Thirteen people support me with a paid subscription (thank you, LP, for the upgrade!). You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

The internet is good at being big and small. Unfortunately, we often forget the latter and focus only on things that reach millions.

Tiny Awards is our little antidote to the internet’s scale and speed obsession. It is a celebration of the small, poetic, and creative web, and the other week we announced this year’s winner: fiftythousandnames.org.

Tiny is not negligible. It is like walking hand in hand with your son, taking small steps, picking up sticks, pennies, and flowers, and being asked if kids can die.

Yes, I answered. If they get sick or get in an accident, but I left out mentioning what is happening across the Mediterranean Sea. There is only one word for that, and I was not ready to explain it to my five-year-old son.

With care,
Kristoffer

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

Shen: Consumed.Today

Shen is a maker and playfellow living in Toronto.

What is Consumed.today?

consumed.today is a site documenting everything i consume (and what consumes me!!). bits of the feed have been tucked away into the archive, and the format has morphed a little over time, but the process has always been deliberately manual. i’ve been serving up daily digests in (somewhat slow-cooked) html batches for over a year now.

Why did you start it?

i started it in 2022 after finishing high school and learning How To Be An Adult in a big new city. i’ve always had weird consumption habits, but for the first time, i had full reign over how i carried them out. naturally, i used this power to mainly eat baby carrots, pretzels, spinach, questionable takes on fried rice, and hershey’s kisses.. while consuming more media than i ever had.

this project was a response to this erratic era, and has since grown into an experiment in archival and self-surveillance. putting it out on the internet (with the vague idea of that it might be perceived) sometimes makes me more aware of what i take in, and at other times, makes it all feel like a silly study in self-anthropology. in any case, it’s been fun to look back every now and then to see how it has served me..

Who or what inspired you?

people often say you are what you eat. i still don’t know who i am or what that would even mean.. but i do know that my diet of foods and feeds has shaped how i experience the world, just as my experience of the world shapes what i reach for next.

in that sense, i am (and this site is) a smorgasbord of so many friends, strangers, meals, and media.. each of which has fed me in ways in i can’t quite begin to map, but that have incrementally changed the very shape of my person. and i think that’s pretty neat!!

WITH LOTS OF LOVE AND A BILLION APOLOGIES..

—shen, creator of consumed.today.

𓆉

Field notes

1.
Putting some soul into tech. It’s Nice That wrote a sweet article about the Tiny Awards nominees. It’s nice that there is a focus back on the web outside of esoteric newsletters like this.

2.
Introducing Areal. Did I want to read about a new font? I thought no. But I loved getting to learn more about Arial through this conversation between Johannes Breyer, Charles Broskoski, and Meg Miller.

3.
Internet Phone Book. We sold 80% of the books. Thank you :)

4.
Call for Participation: Digital Humanities Today: Critical Inquiry with and about the Digital (Sep 30), Forms of digital publication (Oct 10), and Lullaby Machine (Oct 15).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: TechnoMirage (Sep 21, NYC), Breaking the Gloom (Sep 27, London), Start Up - Sounds (Oct 2, London), Wikigame Jame (Oct 3-5, NYC), Extending Poetry through Computation (Oct 10, Online), Triple Canopy Symposium (Oct 10-11, NYC), Peckham Digital (Oct 16-19, London), New Platforms (Oct 18, Sthlm), New Ways of Seeing (Oct 24-25, Paris), and (De)Growing Infrastructures (Nov 27, AMS).

᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃

Wayside flowers

• Significant Incidents & Close Calls in Human Spaceflight

• Dig Archive

• Email is Easy

• Screen-Free Activities for Kids

• Bead Weaver

• Lizard Click

• Reload Clicker

Last email was sent to 4952 inboxes. Twelve people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

How are you? How was your Summer? Or Winter, for those of you reading this from the South. Here in Athens, the temperature is still high. Most days easily slide above 30°C / 86°F. So I drink water in litres, walk in the shadow, and hesitate to write about the Summer in the past.

Nevertheless, Uno’s Summer holiday is over. On Friday, he went to his new school for the first day. He was so happy when I picked him up. Like that bubbly way humans can be when life is good. He also seemed taller as we scooted home; he looked like a boy ready to grow after two months' holiday with his parents.

And me?

I had a blast with Uno. But, I also realized that I couldn’t be with him 24/7 while maintaining all the other non-family things. So I decided to pause this newsletter and focus on counting stars with Uno… and then a whole lot of other stuff, which I’ll unfold over the next weeks, but which I’ll wait with now because I got some big news to share:

The Internet Phone Book is back in stock!

The road to reprinting the book was surprisingly curvy. In fact, so curvy that this statement deserves to be repeated: The Internet Phone Book is back in stock! The Internet Phone Book is back in stock! The Internet Phone Book is back in stock! Let’s continue the chant! The Internet Phone Book is back in stock!

At the time of writing, we already sold 500+ copies, or more than half the books, in just one day. It blows my mind. People are buying the book from literally all over the world with hardly any marketing effort from our side. A couple of friends jokingly asked me how. I honestly attribute this to 99% luck and the fact that so many humans are longing for other ways of using the internet and connecting outside of social media. In this way, the Internet Phone Book is a drip in a flowing river.

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈

Convinced? Get your copy through our friends at Metalabel.

Selling the book with Metalabel allows us to split the earnings with the contributors. We are also sending 10% of the sales to the Living Web Institute treasury (more on this soon-ish). In other words, buying a book = supporting projects keeping the web alive = becoming part of the river = my eternal gratitude = a portal to +700 friends you haven’t met = an invitation to grow in an environment outside of social media = a yellow book.

With care,
Kristoffer

☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆

Yancey Strickler: Metalabel

Yancey Strickler is a writer and entrepreneur whose projects include Kickstarter, Metalabel, The Creative Independent, the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, and Artist Corporations.

What is Metalabel?

Metalabel is a platform for artists to release their work, and for collectors to acquire limited edition artifacts and support artists they love and discover. What’s different from other spaces is Metalabel was built to support people releasing work together. It makes sharing bylines, pooling resources, splitting profits, and collectively building a creative project and business easier than ever. The platform is part of a larger catalogue of projects we have made that are meant to help shift our creative default to cooperate rather than compete.

Why did you start it?

Several years ago I hit burnout with a project and community I was running. A lot of that burnout came from feeling like I was at the top of a hierarchy that would collapse without me, and that didn’t give me peer support.

I ended up reading two things back to back — Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad, which tells the origin story of punk and hardcore bands in America, and the history of the Royal Society, a group that started in 1660 in London that’s largely responsible for science as we know it. With both punk bands and early scientists the labels they released under made them more powerful. Even for a small group of people, that identity gave them the power of legitimization and a permission to support work by others too.

This project is an attempt to manifest those same ideals and strategies, but in the world we live in today, and with the creative and internet values that are core to who we are and how we work.

Who or what inspired you?

How much time do you have? Some labels/projects/people that stand out: Factory Records, American Zoetrope, Dischord Records, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Touch & Go, Odd Future, Badlands Unlimited, the Situationists, the Abolitionists, MSCHF, pg Lang, the Royal Society, my peers in the Dark Forest Collective. The list goes on.

See everything Yancey has collected on Metalabel.

⋆｡𖦹 ˚ 𓇼 ˚｡⋆

Field notes

1.
Internet Phone Book.

2.
Kristoffer Tjalve on the Internet Phone Book. This is a podcast episode. The host is the lovely Samuel Arbesman, and the other guests in the podcast catalogue give me imposter syndrome: Robin Sloan, Neal Agarwal, and Laurel Schwulst. These are all heroes. Anyway, I spoke about how inspiring I find the book ecosystem. You have libraries, archives, bookstores, and magazines fully dedicated to books. It would be incredible to grow a similar rich ecosystem for the web.

3.
Dialing Up the Internet Phonebook. This is a written interview between Piri, Elliott Cost, and me. My favorite part is Piri’s photos of the Internet Phone Book being added to local street libraries. Otherwise, during the Summer, I’ve been thinking about what type of business activity makes sense in this current world, and I think Piri is leading the way with his thoughts on Organic Software and Mom-and-pop stores. Maybe lifestyle businesses ain’t that bad?

4.
Poetic Web Calendar. The calendar returns next week. Feel free to add any events I should remember to include. Or send them to me on email.

5.
Call for Participation. This also returns next week :)

𓅰 𓅬 𓅭 𓅮 𓅯

Wayside flowers*

*Personal websites from the internet phone book edition

• Elle’s Homepage

• Websitesite

• Pitscher.net

• Maple Mavica Syrup

• Alberto Cinco Jr.

• Museum of Alexandra

• Vasilis

Last email was sent to 4829 inboxes. Twelve people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

»Be careful not to hit your head. The people who built the house were hobbits.«

We are in Kastro, a town built on a hill on Sifnos, one of the Cycladic islands in the Aegean Sea. Here, it is not only the doorways that are small. The entire town is tiny. Only eleven families live here during the winter. Even now, at the peak of activity, the town is so small that we need to order bread at the bakery a day in advance.

We walk around the perimeter of the town in a handful of minutes, pick ripe figs for our morning yoghurt, and stack stones on the beach at the foot of the hill. In the evenings, we stay up late to watch the stars. Uno marvels. He recognizes the Big Dipper and wants to see a shooting star. We talk about light pollution, star navigation, and hum Kelly Watch the Stars by AIR.

Humans have lived in Kastro for 3,000 years. The town is built with hands and time. The space between the houses forms the pathways, and you are rarely entirely sure if you are walking on a rock or someone’s roof. It is an interwoven web where Uno runs freely without the fear of cars.

I doubt the town was built to last 3,000 years. Nevertheless, I’m certain that the atmosphere of Kastro is only possible because hundreds of generations have cared for their shared space.

With care,
Kristoffer

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

Paula and Arne: Compost.Party

Paula, a designer, and Arne, a software developer, set up compost.party together and are taking care of keeping it online.

What is Compost.party?

It used to be one of those phones that you keep in your pocket and scroll Twitter on (back then). Then it broke and that was over. Thanks to computers being universal machines and that being kind of like magic it oddly now is a server offering free webspace to anyone who finds some use for it.

Why did you start it?

There's this idea that somehow, after decades of Moore's law, in order to do something useful with technology we have to keep digging stuff out of the ground and pile heaps of waste on top of it. I thought it could be fun to try something else instead.

Who or what inspired you?

The permacomputing community is deeply inspiring, and the feminist server manifesto was both eye opening and encouraging. And maybe just a warm thank you to everybody who uses computers for silly experiments, poetic expression or to share pictures of their garden.

Visit Compost.party (or try again later if the battery is too low to serve you).

𓀂𓀬𓁅𓁅𓃂𓄆𓃻

Field notes

1.
Tiny Awards. It’s the third year of us running Tiny Awards, a celebration of the personal, non-commercial web. I’d say it is the best short list yet. Something in life only gets better; the web is one of them. You can check the nominated sites and cast your vote until September 1st. I’d also be grateful if you’d share the site on your blogs, newsletters, and podcasts. The grass is greener where you water it, so why don’t we let the personal and non-commercial web be what we give our attention and care?

2.
Artist Profile: Daniel Murray. Daniel is a philosopher and artist who uses the web as a medium to open new ways of living, being, and relating. I was lucky to write this artist profile for Rhizome.

3.
Practicing The Web. I spoke with Lullaby Machine about why I do what I do with the web. The interview features the first website Uno made, my son, who recently turned five… Oh, how time flies.

4.
Calls for Participation: Your Wayback Story (Due ?), Good Internet (Due ?), Clientside (Due?), Voiceworks Online (Due 24/8), Pioneer Works Residency (Due 31/8), The Chatroom & The Doll House (Due 31/8), Public Access Memories (Due 1/9), and The Wrong Biennale (Due 15/9).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: Wordhack (NYC, 21/8), Chinatown JS (NYC, 26/8), POST Design Festival (Copenhagen, 12/9), Extending Poetry through Computation (URL, 10/10) and New Ways of Seeing (Paris, 24-25/10).

𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼

Wayside flowers

• Web Materials

• GPS Navigation

• HTML Wind Chime

• Strolling Club

• Cyberfloriography

• Archeoplastica

• Catch Your Bus

Last email was sent to 4793 inboxes. Twelve people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

On Saturday, people meet in +37 cities to celebrate the web during The International HTML Day 2025. That’s incredible.

Among the organizers, there are many familiar names, so I feel safe to say that chances are high that you’ll meet fellow Naive Weekly readers at these gatherings. But more importantly, you’ll meet others who care about the web.

We should all extend a huge thank you to all the local organizers and to Elliott and Laurel for orchestrating all of this.

With care,
Kristoffer

✺

HTML Day, August 2, 2025

• Albuquerque — Organized by Alex & catherine

• Amsterdam — Organized by Braxton

• Atlanta — Organized by Nobel Yoo

• Barcelona — Organized by Fred

• Berlin — Organized by Jack Murray-Brown

• Berlin — Organized by Kagan

• Boston — Organized by Cynthia & Katherine

• Bristol, UK — Organized by QueerTech Bristol

• Buenos Aires — Organized by Juan & Polbac

• Cape Town — Organized by Caleb

• Catskills — Organized by Christopher Roeleveld

• Cologne — Organized by Samuel

• Copenhagen — Organized by Hanna S.

• Detroit — Organized by Connor M.

• Halifax/Dartmouth — Organized by Katherine

• Hudson Valley — Organized by Elliott Etzkorn

• Lisbon — Organized by Djordje Vlaisavljevic

• London — Organized by CranberryLemonade & Ana from Permacomputing Club

• Los Angeles — Organized by Emily

• Minneapolis — Organized by Forest Johnson

• New Haven — Organized by Loren

• New York City — Organized by Ashley & Yu & Justin

• Online — Organized by Zachary Kai

• Ottawa, ON — Organized by Juan & Danny

• Paris — Organized by Ahmet Bugra

• Philadelphia — Organized by ragman & pixel

• Portland, OR — Organized by reed

• San Francisco — Organized by Alex and Ash

• Seattle — Organized by Brianna & Jasmine

• Seoul — Organized by New Order & After New Order

• Shanghai — Organized by [[rect*]]repair, shengli, & yufeng

• Singapore — Organized by Lina

• Sydney — Organized by Max

• Tokyo — Organized by Kitasenju Design

• Toronto — Organized by Garry

• Victoria, BC — Organized by Seán & Kate

• Washington, DC — Organized by Nadia Ford

Missing your city? Consider to organize your own HTML Day Meetup.

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

Field notes

1.
»A sentiment we keep finding is that people want to feel again. The generation that grew up on the glass phone knows only the screen, and every screen they encounter is expected to be a touch screen. All they know is pictures under glass. We don’t need more screen, many are calling for that shift now. We need more surface — more texture, friction, feelings. Objects that keep us in the world and invite us further into reality.« — Norm in The Object I’m Holding Is Not a Phone

2.
Are you building technology projects that stimulate care, inquisitiveness, or self-control? Check out the AE2025 program we just launched with Apossible.

3.
The internet has the yellow pages (again). Elliott and I did an interview with the lovely newsletter called From the Superhighway. You’ll need to scroll a bit to read our answers.

4.
Calls for Participation: Graywolf Lab (Due, 28/7), SFPC Fall (Due 3/8), AE2025 (Due 15/8), Taper #15 (Due 15/8), Your Wayback Story (Due ?), Good Internet (Due ?), and The Wrong Biennale (Due 15/9).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: FWB Fest (Idyllwild, 1-3/8), HTML Day (World wide, 2/8), What Hackers Yarn (Geestmerambacht, 8-12/8), the intersection of art & technology #12 (SF, 10/8), POST Design Festival (Copenhagen, 12/9), and New Ways of Seeing (Paris, 24-25/10).

❁✿❀❁✿❀

Wayside flowers

• 88x31 Collection

• Cow Stars

• Your Energy Mix

• Virtual Zine Library

• Collection of Things

• Hand Wave

• Draw a Fish

Last email was sent to 4742 inboxes. Twelve people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

I remain optimistic about the web. I attribute a sizable chunk of my optimism to the many years of work done by Elliott Cost and Laurel Schwulst, two good friends, and familiar names to anyone reading this newsletter regularly.

They are currently preparing for the fourth edition of HTML Day, an annual celebration of the web, with people gathering in parks and sitting on the grass all over the world. This is, literally, a grassroots movement of the world wide web. We are lucky to have Elliott and Laurel as the energy conductors.

With care,
Kristoffer

⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡⋆

Elliott & Laurel: HTML Day

Elliott Cost and Laurel Schwulst are two friends who keep the energy burning.

What is html day?

HTML Day is an annual celebration of ❇️ HTML Energy. This year (2025), it’s happening on Saturday, August 2, 2025 around the world!

Last year (2024), 22 cities hosted their own HTML Day. It happened in: Sydney, New York City, Rotterdam, Seoul, Shanghai, Toronto, Honolulu, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal, Stockholm, Hamburg, London, Saskatoon, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Austin, Portland (Maine), Atlanta, Lee/Lenox, and Seattle. There are some photos/videos here and here and here.

Why did you start it?

We didn't start the energy
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the energy
No, we didn't light it, but we tried put into an .html

Who or what inspired you?

Everyone that attended HTML Day in 2024, everyone that attended HTML Day in 2023, everyone that attended HTML Day in 2022, Bill Wurtz, Neta Bomani, Ritu Ghiya, Omar Rizwan, Aidan Quinlan, Philip Guo, Emma Rae Norton, Larissa Pham, Pirijan Ketheswaran, Marie Otsuka, Korede Aderele, Tom Bubul, Becca Abbe, Laurel, Min Gu Hong Manufacturing, Extra Practice, HTML Energy, Birdcall, Dr. Naive, Max Bo, Chia Amisola, Polina Lobanova, Hunter, Ben, Shengli, Jake, Pete, Ren, Star, Toph Tucker, Cindy, Yara, hello to our patreons, Sue, Kevin, Mom, Jill, Curtis, ❇️the universe.

Want to be a part this year (2025)? Fire up your local event .html website for Saturday, August 2nd. Specific instructions over at our events.html page!

𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼

Field notes

1.
A Short Introduction to Feral Technology. I make an effort to read everything that Austin Wade Smith writes, as they always tickles the boundaries of my imagination..

2.
Being a script. This reads well with the above link. Here, Raphael Bastide reflects on how technology informs our perception of the world. It's experimental.

3.
I printed my Instagram feed for a month. We have all thought about it. Tiffany did it. Kudos.

4.
Calls for Participation: Taper #15 (Due 15/8), and The Wrong Biennale (Due 15/9).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: Vector Festival (Toronto, 10-20/7), Kernel Magazine (SF, 17/7), Needlebound Volume 2 (Toronto, 17/7), Zine Workshop: What is the internet made of? (London, 19/7), FWB Fest (Idyllwild, 1-3/8), HTML Day (World wide, 2/8), HTML in Hyde #1 (Sydney, 2/8), What Hackers Yarn (Geestmerambacht, 8-12/8), and POST Design Festival (Copenhagen, 12/9).

⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏𓂁﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖

Wayside flowers

• We once existed here

• Words uttered in Network (1976)

• Internet Flowers

• Earth Map Song

• ASCIIMoon

• Spiral Getty

• Literature-Map

Last email was sent to 4719 inboxes. Twelve people support me with a paid subscription (thank you, George, for upgrading). You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

I’m not sure there’s a way to explain this that will make sense outside our household…

For the past week, our feet have taken on personalities of their own. I mean that quite literally. Each foot now has its own voice and behavior. For instance, my right foot has become Uno’s best friend. They bond by mocking me. Uno will tell my right foot, named “Foot”, to say that Dada (me) is a silly goose. Foot obeys, and they both burst into laughter.

This goes on for hours. And when it’s time for bed, Uno lies down in reverse so he can chat with Foot before falling asleep.

With care,
Kristoffer

⋆｡˚ ☁︎ ˚｡⋆｡˚☽˚｡⋆

Andrew Trousdale: Apossible

Andrew Trousdale is a researcher and designer.

What is Apossible?

We're a non-profit research and design initiative bringing together creatives, technologists and psychologists to create technologies that bring out the best in us.

Why did you start it?

My background is in a field called positive psychology, which studies human flourishing. Whereas much of psychology focuses on illness and disorder, positive psychology focuses on building on strengths and virtues. So much of the conversation around technology focuses on what can go wrong, how it can derail human flourishing. There’s nothing wrong with that, and its important work. But we started apossible to try to imagine what can go right.

Who or what inspired you?

From the outset, creative technologists and the projects they produce have filled me with hope about the role that technology can have in life, the place that it can fill. I really believe technology can make life much better if it's used with the right intentions and toward the right ends. I love seeing how the creative technology community explores and experiments with the difficult question: what should technology be for?

You can stay updated with Apossible on Instagram or by subscribing to the newsletter on their website.

⋆｡𖦹 ˚ 𓇼 ˚｡⋆

Field Notes

1.
Solar Social. I believe that whatever social software or application comes next should ideally not imitate any of the existing ones. Maybe thinking with the sun could help us bridge our imagination into new territories? We would even need siestas in high summer.

2.
Cursor games. The creator behind some of the wildly popular browser games such as One Million Checkboxes and One Million Chessboards writes about some experimental games he is making using only the cursor’s text-selection function. (Nolen, if you are reading this, please make these public).

3.
Joanie 4 Jackie. How did I not know about Miranda July’s videotape chain letter project? Please, readers, if you know of any experimental publishing projects, new or old, could you send them to me? Or write them in the comments? Thank you so much.

4.
Calls for Participation: Believers Grant (Due 30/6), Peckham Digital (Due 30/6), Tiny Awards (Due 30/6), HCI.Place (Due 1/7), MFRU31 (Due 7/7), Taper #15 (Due 15/8), and The Wrong Biennale (Due 15/9).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: Pagasa (29/6, Chicago), DxD25 (3-4/7, London), HTML in the Park (5/7, Toronto), Vector Festival (Toronto, 10-20/7), FWB Fest (Idyllwild, 1-3/8), HTML Day (World wide, 2/8), HTML in Hyde #1 (Sydney, 2/8), What Hackers Yarn (Geestmerambacht, 8-12/8), and POST Design Festival (Copenhagen, 12/9).

🐾

Wayside Flowers

• Rate Your Music

• The Anti-Subscription Catalogue

• Everything at the Forest Park

• Semantic Art Search

• Raise Your Hand to Raise the Roof

• Pathfinder

• Not Twitter

Last email was sent to 4701 inboxes. Twelve people support me with a paid subscription (thank you, Guus, for upgrading). You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

The upcoming week promises 40°C (104°F). Maybe promise is the wrong word. Warns would undoubtedly be more fitting, given that the calendar says June.

I still struggle to adapt my daily life to the realities of the weather. I was born and raised in Denmark, a country known for LEGO bricks and rainy days. In fact, many Danes would tell you that there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. (They say this proudly, dressed in outdoor gear made for arctic exploration while strolling the shopping street with their €7.5 flat white to-go).

So, being Danish, last year, you’d find me running on the streets of Athens during Midday at 36°C. But no worries, I was wearing my hand-embroidered sunflower baseball cap.

Now, I recite to myself that winter is for all-day outdoor activities. Summer? Let’s switch on the air-conditioner and continue building that LEGO landscape.

With care,
Kristoffer

𐦂𖨆𐀪𖠋

Gijs de Boer: Self Model Making

Gijs de Boer is an artistic researcher and educator living in Rotterdam.

What is Self-model-making?

An open artistic research group on how Things structure our concepts of the Self. When we think of thinking as ‘processing', or DNA as ‘code', or creation as ‘generation', technologies become a kind of 'self-model’ that shape how we relate to our selves and the world around. In monthly sessions, hosted at Extra Practice in Rotterdam (NL) and online, we discuss texts, reflect through drawings, diagrams and writings, and work towards publishing some outcomes in September.

Why did you start it?

Throughout my studies I kept learning about relationality: how the model of a self separated from context and history is a myth that sits comfortably at the root of many crises and forms of extraction. But what made this myth so believable? If I would be so relational, then what material contexts make me often feel like I'm separate? I wanted to explore this question in the most relational way I could: by opening it up to others.

Who or what inspired you?

There’s a lot from my Extra Practice studio mates. Elliott helping to see this research stream as a 'life project’. Emma suggesting that I can use our space to host. Ben's Homemade Computer Club at Varia. Kirsten's online curriculum sites (also inspired by fruitful.school). Jack’s many small material experiments. And a desire to test our self-hosted Etherport publishing tool.

People are welcome to join any session that resonates (next one is on June 26). More info online and stay posted about sessions and findings via the newsletter.

▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။|||| |

Field Notes

1.
Memory Banks. On how data is stored on magnetic tape and why we should become active caretakers of our most valuable files. I enjoyed the story of the person who bought what she believed was an empty VHS tape at a thrift store, only to discover it contained footage of a newborn, prompting her to search for the original owners.

2.
Computing Shrines. Witnessing the growth of friends is one of the best things in life. Here, Spencer Chang unfolds some of the work they have done around intimacy, communality, and situational computing.

3.
»When it comes to routines and rituals, I’m more like the seasons than the expansion of the universe. I keep falling in love with new practices, only to see them fade as the weather shifts. I would run every day for half a year, then stop for three years until I decided to run a marathon with three weeks of practice.«

— Kristoffer (me) in an interview with Apossible.

4.
Calls for Participation: Believers Grant (Due 30/6), Peckham Digital (Due 30/6), Tiny Awards (Due 30/6), HCI.Place (Due 1/7), and Taper #15 (Due 15/8).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: Meme Reading Club (23/6, Rome), Synthesis Assembly (LA, 28/6), DxD25 (3-4/7, London), Vector Festival (Toronto, 10-20/7), FWB Fest (Idyllwild, 1-3/8), What Hackers Yarn (Geestmerambacht, 8-12/8), and POST Design Festival (Copenhagen, 12/9).

⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡⋆

Wayside Flowers

• Taper #14 : Sonnets

• Palm Farm

• Exit Strategies

• 1 Greeting Per Week

• Indigenous Values Based Healing

• Yellow

• Wiki Radio

NB: The title of today’s newsletter refers to the latest addition to the LEGO landscape.

Last email was sent to 4702 inboxes. Eleven people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

One of the joys of working on the same project over multiple years is witnessing how it slowly finds its form and community.

Take Tiny Awards, the annual award I’m organizing with Matt Muir and Matt Klein. Before it became Tiny Awards with its own handmade website and an A-list of judges, it was called WWWonderful Award and ran as a sixteen-week-long poll inside this newsletter. The nominated sites were good, but the name wasn’t. It was also my own little party, an insider celebration, and hardly anything aspiring anyone to make and maintain small, creative, and poetic websites.

It’s very touching to see how the silly idea grew into something that feels almost like an institution. This year, we have received hundreds of nominations. What’s even more motivating is how the flow of nominations is steady, representing the many different ways in which people discover Tiny Awards. The project no longer relies on any single person or group; it exists in a rich web of people, communities, and links.

With care,
Kristoffer

Ps. Nominations for Tiny Awards are open until the end of the month. It is free (as awards should be!). You can submit as many sites as you want, including sites by others who you think deserve recognition. The most important criterion is that the site was made within the past twelve months.

────୨ৎ────

Hayley Mortin: Needlebound

Hayley Mortin is a design researcher and textile artist working in Montreal.

What is Needlebound?

Needlebound is a fibre arts publication I started to hold space for writing that reflects the slowness, tension, and complexity of making things by hand. It brings together experimental essays, visual work, and reflections that explore the contradictory experience of crafting something slowly in an attention economy built to reward speed.

Why did you start it?

I kept looking for a publication that felt true to the kinds of exchanges I was having online— about process, materials, the tenderness of making something slowly. Most of what I found felt either too polished or too academic. I wanted to take the texture of online fiber conversations (Instagram comments, voice notes from a friend, Close Friends stories) and give them a format that didn’t rush or flatten their nuance.

Who or what inspired you?

Needlebound was shaped by publications that treat the internet as something tender and mutable. Are.na Annual felt like holding a digital rabbit hole in your hands. Press & Fold Magazine showed how you can approach craft with a curatorial eye and still keep it approachable. Both reminded me that publishing can be rigorous without being rigid which is the balance I wanted to strike with Needlebound.

Pre-order Needlebound Volume Two or learn more about Hayley through her website, Instagram and Are.na.

𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼

Field Notes

1.
The History of the Web. I really enjoy receiving this newsletter. In the latest edition, we travel back to 1995 and learn about how people explored the web 30 years ago. While I’m familiar with many of the stories, I’m always presented with details I didn’t already know, like Jeff Bezos choosing Amazon.com for its early placement in alphabetical directories.

2.
Tropical Technologist. I hope that whatever comes (now and) next for the internet will appear more like an archipelago than a plantation.

3.
»When a tutorial becomes too short, the clock becomes the stopwatch; and the stopwatch doesn’t just measure – it controls. It changes how we relate to ourselves and to others. When time is compressed into units of efficiency, we stop noticing the subtle transitions. The thresholds, the mood swings, the slow dawning of understanding… all become a disturbance in a system that values speed over presence.«

— Silvio Lorusso in Granular Time

4.
Calls for Participation: Game Poems (Due 15/6), Miss Video 4U (Due, ongoing), A Printed Poetry Leaflet (Due, ongoing), Everyoneisagirl (Due 15/6), form + foliage (Due 15/6), Protostars Grants (Due 16/6), Error 406 (Due 17/6), Believers Grant (Due 30/6), Peckham Digital (Due 30/6), Tiny Awards (Due 30/6), and HCI.Place (Due 1/7).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: Touching Computers (NYC, 18/6), Web Archiving (NYC, 18/6), Tech-queries with Polly (Copenhagen, 19/6), Wordhack (NYC, 19/6), Computation Rehearsal (Singapore, 21/6), Synthesis Assembly (LA, 28/6), Vector Festival (Toronto, 10-20/7), FWB Fest (Idyllwild, 1-3/8), What Hackers Yarn (Geestmerambacht, 8-12/8), and POST Design Festival (Copenhagen, 12/9),

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

Wayside Flowers

• A Poem a Day

• Music Is My Therapist

• Gift Interfaces

• Poetica

• Stargazer

• Ceramic Materials Atlas

• Heartspotting

Last email was sent to 4692 inboxes. Eleven people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

We are back with the third edition of Tiny Awards, the annual celebration of those magical sites made by someone, for someone.

You can submit any site made in the past twelve months. It doesn’t even have to be your own, and there’s no submission fee. Submissions are open until the end of the month, after which our (outstanding) jury will nominate a shortlist for public voting.

The past two winners are One Minute Park (2024) and Rotating Sandwiches (2023). In other words: the very best of the internet, and fine company for whichever site wins this year.

With care,
Kristoffer (and Matt K & Matt W, the Tiny Awards co-organizers)

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

Samuel Arbesman: The Magic of Code

Samuel Arbesman is an author and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital.

What is The Magic of Code?

The Magic of Code is my attempt to rekindle a sense of delight in computing, showing that understanding computers is not just a branch of engineering but a kind of humanistic liberal art, one that touches on language, philosophy, biology, art, ancient mythology, and so much more. It's a fun romp through the weirdness and wonders of computation.

Why did you write The Magic of Code?

I wrote this book as a sort of love letter to the computer. Our society's relationship with technology feels a bit broken, and I hope this book might be able to restore a sense of excitement and wonder. But it's also the kind of book I wish I had when I was younger and first becoming interested in computers. I had to cobble together many of these ideas on my own when I was young, and I hope this is the sort of book that can inspire and delight those who are not yet familiar with code and computers.

Who or what inspired you?

My experiences when I was young definitely inspired this book. My family were early adopters of computers, with my father getting us a Commodore VIC-20 when I was little, and then followed by an early Macintosh. We also had early access to the Internet. All of these experiences and more—along with my parents' support of my explorations of these digital worlds—helped me to realize that computing could be a source of wonder and a window into so much.

Pre-order The Magic of Code (it’s wonderful) and visit website Samuel’s website (it’s also wonderful).

𓅰 𓅬 𓅭 𓅮 𓅯

Field Notes

1.
Sharing Screen with Chia Amisola. The final Internet Home Tour is coming up. It’s been such a joy to co-host this mini series with wide smiles from guests and participants throughout. This Wednesday, we visit the home of Chia Amisola, my favourite web artist of all time. I highly recommend joining if you can.

2.
Tiny Awards. Submissions are open until the end of the month. I didn’t realize, until much later, that most other awards require a fee just to submit a site. How did that ever become acceptable? Awards shouldn’t be bought.

3.
How to Build the Good Internet. (I’m quoted)

4.
Calls for Participation: Lullaby Machine second issue (Due 10/6), Zoomusic (Due 12/6), Everyoneisagirl (Due 15/6), form + foliage (Due 15/6), Protostars Grants (Due 16/6), Error 406 (Due 17/6), Believers Grant (Due 30/6), Peckham Digital (Due 30/6), Tiny Awards (Due 30/6), and HCI.Place (Due 1/7).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: Poetics of Computing (Rotterdam, 10/6), Sharing Screen with Chia Amisola (online, 11/6), Cursor Launch Party (Copenhagen, 13/6), FWB Fest (Idyllwild, 1-3/8), and What Hackers Yarn (Geestmerambacht, 8-12/8)

𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

Wayside flowers

• Let’s hold hands

• 12 Seasons NYC

• Nice rocks

• Emoji composition

• Landscape Painting

• Poolsuite V3

• Hello Archive

Last email was sent to 4682 inboxes. Eleven people support me taking time putting this email together with paid subscriptions (thanks for the upgrade, Orian!). You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)

Dear reader,

Back in April, I wrote the first Investor Report to the Cloudlord.management Partners. The main message was that I had decided to commit to my internet-related work:

(…)

I’m reading A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy novel about a young magician named Ged who, in an act of show-off, releases a dark shadow creature. Ged journeys through escaping, hunting, and, finally, accepting the dark shadow he released. Something inside me clicks, and I decide to shift how I perceive my internet projects: they should be the center of my work attention.

(…)
Snippet from Investor Report - Spring 2025

It’s still foggy how it will pan out, but I’m beyond happy about the decision.

I also sense that the tides are shifting. There is a longing for projects showing another way of being online. It’s as if we commonly agree that the primary platforms are inadequate while simultaneously rejecting the “internet is bad” narrative.

May was busy with the Internet Phone Book and Sharing Screen. Fortunately, June looks even busier. The past months have been the most fun work-wise in ages: I love working on keeping the internet alive.

With care,
Kristoffer

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

Anežka Minaříková: Stream of Stream

Anežka Minaříková is a graphic designer, illustrator, and writer based in New York.

What is Stream of Stream?

Stream of Stream is an ongoing archive of streams. Each stream is recorded using an underwater microphone and uploaded to the cloud. There, the sound of flowing water becomes a digital stream—a continuous transmission of data over the internet. It’s both a literal and poetic meditation on what it means to stream in the digital age.

Why did you make Stream of Stream?

Stream of Stream began as a university school project during COVID. For our final presentations, we were asked to create a performance—something that would take place in person but also be streamed online. At the time, I was spending a lot of time walking in nature. During a conversation with one of our teachers about my walks and studio work, I joked: What if I just streamed a stream?

That project lives on—maybe because my husband and I often go on long walks with our two dogs, and we frequently come across brooks, creeks, streams and rivers. I started carrying an underwater recorder in my backpack—one I bought online, originally intended for recording whale sounds—and whenever we passed one, I’d sometimes record the audio and upload it to the website to share with friends.

Who or what inspired you?

At the time, I was reading Timothy Morton’s books—especially his ideas about ecology and the entanglement of nature and technology. I was also influenced by New Dark Age by James Bridle, who writes about how we use metaphors from nature—clouds, streams, viruses—to describe the digital world. I found that fascinating: how we frame machine processes in poetic terms, and in doing so, forget what they truly are.

“Streaming” evokes a peaceful flow, but in reality, it’s a constant, energy-intensive digital process. Meanwhile, real water flow generates energy in the physical world. But for me, the sound of water is simply calming.

Visit Stream of Stream and Anežka’s personal website and Instagram.

𓅰 𓅬 𓅭 𓅮 𓅯

Field Notes

1.
Sharing Screen with Jisu Lee. We continue our communal internet tour on Wednesday, June 4, when we share screen with Jisu from Birdcall, probably the most HTML-punk focal point on the internet.

2.
Good Internet Magazine. Congratulations to everyone involved for bringing a new publication to life. Regular Naive Weekly readers will be familiar with contributors like Zachary Kai, Sacha Judd, and Taylor Troesh.

3.
Adjacent, Issue 12: Becoming. I have yet to take a proper read of the latest issue of Adjacent, the journal of emerging media, published by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Maybe we can co-read this Sunday?

4.
Calls for Participation: Muze Creative Grants (Due 6/6), Lullaby Machine second issue (Due 10/6), Everyoneisagirl (Due 15/6), form + foliage (Due 15/6), Protostars Grants (Due 16/6), Error 406 (Due, 17/6), Believers Grant (Due 30/6), and Peckham Digital (Due 30/6).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: Internet Phone Book Talk (hybrid, 1/6), PAM’s virtual residency exhibition (online, 1/6), Sharing Screen with Jisu Lee (online, 4/6), Demo Day (NYC, 4/6), Materials (London, 7/6), Poetics of Computing (Rotterdam, 10/6), and Cursor Launch Party (Copenhagen, 13/6).

𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

Wayside Flowers

• Historical Tech Tree

• Shimmering

• Wandering Stones

• Font Fish

• Owls in Towels

• The Restroom Archive

• Flight Fee Dodger

Last email was sent to 4668 inboxes. Ten people support me taking time putting this email together with paid subscriptions (thanks for the upgrade, Sarah!). You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)