There’s a Japanese proverb that goes 一期一会 (Ichigo ichi-e), which literally translates to “one time, one meeting.” But in practice, it’s used to capture how every particular moment and gathering only exists once in a lifetime. Striking up a conversation with a stranger on a park bench, making eye contact with someone on the bus, even hanging out with friends in the park on a random afternoon, are all once-in-a-lifetime events.

In 2026, people are going offline as much as possible—I think, in large part, to reclaim this feeling of preciousness around life. They’re chaining their phones to their walls, starting movements to touch grass, and creating entire product lines around reducing phone usage. In the face of a hostile internet, abstinence has become the mainstream accepted response. We crave the spontaneity we know to be in the physical world.

I don’t blame them. The Internet looks quite grim these days. Dead internet theory, stating that the internet is being overtaken and, eventually, will only be inhabited by bots, is entering mainstream discourse as AI social accounts multiply and compete for what flavor of slop comes after Italian brainrot. People are arguing with fake people, and creators have to clarify that they didn’t use AI to make the work they share. Culture commentators are writing about the death of the open internet as people retreat into dark forests, private spaces like group chats that are hidden from the web.

The Internet has lost its innocence, and logging on feels like fighting for survival.

But every once in a while, we still encounter something meaningful that makes it all worth it. Something heartwarming, genuine, inspiring, or joyful that justifies all the hours scrolling and a lifetime chained to our devices. Earnestness shines through even in “content” manufactured for spread.

If dead internet theory posits that the internet will eventually become only bots, alive internet theory proclaims we will never let the open internet die. We will always find a way to look for each other, to answer a call for help, to share a laugh and an argument right after one another. If there’s one trait of the human race that every apocalypse movie agrees on, it’s our will to survive.

We still have hope for the Internet because deep down, we still believe in each other.

The Internet uniquely brings people together who would have never met in the real world on a global scale. We can connect with others over niche interests while being exposed to a thousand other worldviews. At its best, the Internet cultivates our unique differences and allows them to coexist. Rather than a monoculture, we form a multi-faceted, collective network, interconnected but not forced to assimilate. This pluriverse of cultures breeds other differences, hybrids, and niches to connect over.

I actually rediscovered Ichigo ichi-e on my TikTok feed, in a spontaneous meeting via the algorithm several years ago. From what I can remember, the video featured a creator talking about a random encounter with an old man in Tokyo, how, in under 8 minutes, they shared the different problems their countries faced and uncovered this tangible sense of shared humanity.

There are two reasons this has stayed with me for so long.

First, it’s a reminder that spontaneity in digital space is still very much possible and can lead to the kinds of encounters that I wouldn’t have the chance to experience through my physical body.

Second, it’s a testament to how deeply we can impact each other through such simple means, and perhaps, the primitive nature of the methods frees us to break past our abstract notions of society to reach a deeper emotional level.

We still live on the Internet, and as long as we do, we can still bump into each other and have these life-changing encounters. But it’s been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the scrollbar until our eyes bleed.

We are all so online, yet being online feels so solitary. Social media is designed for content consumption, brand distribution, and prestige broadcasting, not the warm, funny, and weird moments that happen when humans simply exist together.

We’ve been conditioned to think the Internet can’t be changed, but all our current interfaces—infinite feeds, follower counts, black-box algorithms—are features created by social media platforms to optimize their metrics. Just as they were made, they can also be transformed.

Like guerrilla public improvement projects put benches in public spaces, repopulate foliage in neglected intersections, or transform dumping sites into neighborhood gathering spots, we can also retrofit and reshape our digital space.

So what would an Internet that actually encourages these encounters feel like?

Where can we sit together on the internet? How do we discover a new neighborhood, shelter under a bodega awning during a summer shower, sit quietly at a cafe and work among the chatter of strangers?

Maybe it starts with breaking down the capital-I Internet into several, much-less intimidating tiny internets where we can experiment with new forms of coexisting and relating to one another online.

Rather than a single feed or the same interface copy-and-pasted under new management and brand colors, we might find how people have imagined new ways of living online. Maybe there are no profiles and the feed is a random constellation of images for every minute of the day. Perhaps you have to say hi to five new people before you can write your status. Or you have to go hunting for every new piece of content, pixel by pixel across the screen.

Maybe strangers spontaneously travel through URL rabbit holes together, collectively deciding which way to go next. Meanwhile, others can sit together on the sidelines and watch them bustle.

In my neighborhood internet, I’m a regular at several local spots. I stop by to see the new community chatter, bring a gift or two, and forage for some inspiration from the archives that people have brought back. Some days I travel to other neighborhoods, even new countries, and experience how the culture changes. How do they share their updates? What’s their way of greeting each other? How do they gather inspiration?

We can run into each other

As I run around the web, I spontaneously encounter others in the same places, online together at the same time. I can wave at them, share a warm conversation, play cursor tag, and shake the web page to call others to join us. We share a brief moment of intimacy to honor fate bringing us together.

We can watch each other

Like going to a busy city park and watching the immensity of life unfold, I can take things slow and watch people in their digital pursuits. I can take the scenic path as we travel between links, notice people on their respective commutes and adventures, and get lost in a new place.

We can be remembered

When I visit a website, dig around the links, and leave a note for the owner, the traces of my presence don’t disappear after I leave. Our actions leave a felt mark. This digital patina adds an extra texture to websites, hinting at who has passed through, how frequently they come, and the adventures that have unfolded here.

We can be recognized

In real life, we’re recognized for our faces, names, and styles. In the digital world, we should be recognizable if we meet again, whether it’s the way we move our cursors, the colors we choose, or the marks we make.

I’ve been experimenting with creating internet neighborhoods of my own, to make poems with strangers, turn the lights off to say good night, collect every color in existence, and grab a drink at the cursor bar after a long day scrolling.

I want everyone to be able to create their own Internet gathering spaces, so I made playhtml, an open-source library for designing communal internet experiences by enhancing web elements with real-time, persistent interactivity. Take it for a spin, and if you need help, remember that I’m just across the web.

Somewhere right now, two strangers’ cursors are touching. Someone is breaking ground on a new piece of the internet for their personal website. Hundreds more are visiting tiny spaces and games to share their feelings with their online family.

The Internet was never promised to be open, free, or modifiable. Born in the U.S. military and courted by several private companies, it could have easily been seized by a single entity. Instead, many brave people fought to keep it open to everyone, collectively stewarded by many, and owned by no one.

We can shape these internets together, piece by piece. We can make our own public parks, cafes, bodegas, waterfalls, and mountains. We can take care of them, not as users, but as stewards maintaining a home for generations to come.

These internets won’t be an escape from the real world. We’ll go offline to touch grass, hang out with friends, and then come back online to find friends and strangers a world away, meeting for a brief moment. One time, one meeting. 一期一会.

In 1991, Mark Weiser wrote “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

Weiser was CTO at Xerox Parc, the infamous research lab that gave birth to many of the modern computing inventions like the desktop, the mouse, the GUI, among many many more. In this essay, he presented “ubiquitous computing,” a vision of technology with computers embedded into all of our daily objects rather than stuck in powerful desktops. A core part of the idea was idea of pads, a small handheld, “scrap computer,” which should be treated like scrap paper.1

This idea of “scrap computers” stuck with me, and I found myself reflecting what makes something disposable. What makes disposable software? How do you practice disposable making?

I like the term because it sounds like an insult. It dares you to engage with something rough on the edges and easily dismissed. But it also gives you permission to follow your gut because there’s no pressure to show something good.

My natural instinct is to explore via quantity: making a lot of stuff around a theme, fumbling my way to something of meaning. I’m not built to polish one final artifact. I keep fighting my natural instinct because polish is what gets rewarded, but what if I leaned into what I’m good at?

On my birthday in 2021, I started a challenge to write 100 mini-essays by the end of the year. It began as a gambit to myself—can I even make 100 things if I commit to it? The start was slow and hard as all starts are. I gnawed and railed against the commitment, forcing myself to sit down and setting timers to make sure I didn’t spend too long on any individual piece. Then, after a few times, a surprising ease settles in. It’s still hard every once in a while when I get stuck, but overall, it’s smooth, almost natural. Some pieces were certainly meh if not bad. Others felt like striking gold but only digging so far to see a glimpse of it above the dirt, like a golden iceberg rising out of the ground. Most of all, the process helped me understand the kind of writer I was.

In the end, I wrote 50,000+ words by the end of 2021, about the size of an average non-fiction book. (this is the first time I’ve compared it to a book and wow, it really feels shocking to make that realization).

This kind of daily making isn’t foreign to art making or even software art making. It’s a common constraint in drawing classes to do timed drawings, one-minute, five-minute, and so on. Zach Lieberman, an established code artist, recently opened a show showcasing 10 years of practicing daily sketches.

These things are all disposable—cheap, easily replaceable or take limited time but still very much valuable. They are intentional and taken in aggregate, meaningful and impressive.

Even things that are simple and “dumb” on the surface, become poetic when you commit to them long enough. I’ve been obsessed with finding and following the most insane examples of the “day x of y” videos on social media. For example, kicking a rock until it’s a sphere for hundreds of days, finding the crunchiest leaf, spinning loaves of bread, dropping a hydroflask, even fermenting kimchi at a Dave & Busters (h/t Danielle).2

There’s a freedom in the simple constraints. Your mind learns what can it be on autopilot for and starts discover creative angles in the repetition.

With the rise of LLMs and “vibe coding,” more and more essays and software are disposable in a different way. They have little to no lasting value and many are designed to “trick you” to capture your attention. They are empty.

It feels like walking into an abandoned mall: all the bones and none of the life.

These things are both disposable, but one is scrap—quick & intuitive but intentional—and the other is trash—mindlessly created en-masse.

What separates meaningful disposable work from empty work?

It’s not time invested or amount of flourish or even the end impact of it.

The value comes from the story, the intention, the lore behind the practice. The world around the work is what gives it soul. The meaning comes from the process and the commitment.

It’s the same thing that separates all the tech words that we’ve lost (community, agency, taste) from the real thing.

You know it when you see it. What’s real feels intimate, honest, true.

I’m thinking about all the daily practices I’ve tried in the past: creating experiments for playhtml, posting videos talking to the camera, & doing something physical with my hands.

I stopped doing this as much in public because I’ve become more self-conscious about what I share as my following has grown. I feel pressure to make my content worth it for people to consume and worry about attracting haters. I keep trying to remind myself that making people feel something is better than making them feel nothing, and receiving strong responses is what it means to make meaningful art.

I’d like to return to these humble, primitive roots, to share works-in-progress, experiments that become obsolete, and potential failures.

Today’s media economy also rewards continuous output. Attention decays fast. The momentum of continuously putting things out carries an unstoppable quality. Scrap works have a certain lightness to them that allows you to play, and the continual practice (and virtuous cycle of improvement) makes it feel like it produces perpetual energy.

Some artists would like to be inscrutable, but I’ve never understood that perspective. I’m reminding myself that my work is an attempt to connect with others—to feel deeply understood through my creations. I want the things I make to feel like one big accumulation of the same ideas.

I’ve been reading Brian Eno’s diary, A Year of Swollen Appendices, and at the beginning of the year, he recalls an old saying, “Old ideas don’t go away - new ones just get added.” Three years into exploring my own ideas full-time, I find it to be true. These days I’m still working on making a more lived-in, alive internet (in a new evolution of a project I started four years ago), inventing more playful ways to weird our ubiquitous devices, and discovering the joys of new ways of seeing, through materials, crafts, and structures.

I can’t wait to make again tomorrow.

In the spirit of disposable making, I’m going to be turning this section of my newsletter back into its original spirit of lab notes. It should be regular, easy (not so edited), and most of all, honest. Hope they make you feel more welcome to chime in :)

Updates

1. I’m making Internet portraits out of my cursor movements, keypresses, scrolls, etc. I’m anonymously collecting this data from others to create a collective portrait, and I’d be honored to have your data contribute. Eventually, the hope is for this to turn the entire internet into a shared, living social space that changes with our actual use and presence on websites. Sign up on wewere.online

   SIGN UP TO TRY!

2. I just released an easter egg on my website that shows people when I’m home and launches a live chat. I’d like to host an online studio visit at some point in the next couple of weeks. If you’re interested, just reply and I’ll tell you the details! I’ll also post on my socials about this at some point

3. I have a couple of shows coming up! On May 2nd-July in Miami some of my cursor trail work will be shown at What’s My Line and I’ll be debuting an embodied cousin of the cursor work at All Street Gallery for Recalculating Route.

what i’m paying attention to
or a short poem made from my recent are.na blocks

chopsticks makers, NASA artist-in-residence spelling with the earth, crickets in public toilets (h/t riley), keyboard sculpture, bespoke tv show video games for social media, artists that do it for the love of the game, the depths of cursed technology, it’s selfish to be an artist but if you do it, believe in something.

(I’m experimenting with this new form—perhaps another daily disposable making practice… pls let me know if you enjoy, but i enjoyed just doing this in 5 mins so i think i will keep doing it..)

This dispatch was sent to 2274 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress).

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Thank you to the 30 people who supported my independent work with a sponsorship last month, and a warm welcome to Mara, Tyrone, and Kendall.

software you can touch

I’ve long struggled with how to describe myself. If you take a tour through my old posts, you’ll find a weaving evolution of descriptors and terminology. Artist, engineer, designer, internet caretaker, creative technologist, writer, researcher. Nouns—traditional, evocative, and unconventional—come and go and shuffle back and forth.

I’ve cringed at how verbose I’ve had to be in describing myself. If you are a creative person, I’m sure you know the struggle of attempting to answer the dreaded question “so what do you do?” when meeting a new person. You’d think that after almost three years working on my own things that I’d have a good answer to this by now, but I’ve found that the clarity (or perhaps it’s merely confidence) comes in waves. Sometimes the answer comes smoothly, as natural as saying my name. Other times, it begins with a long pause and a stilted answer that makes me yearn for a do-over after.

I met someone recently who told me that they followed me because of this new tagline in my bio: “software you can touch.” So I guess something about it is working!

A tagline is basically a really, really difficult introduction. It entails condensing your introduction down into less than a single sentence. When there’s so little space for words, you start to overthink each meaning. What does it mean to say I’m an artist? What does it mean if I say artist before designer, designer before engineer? What do I really value when I have to choose what comes first?

It’s so easy to forget that words are hard. In fact, they’re probably harder now that making software is so easy. The shorter they are, the harder they become. You have less leeway to make your point, less time to convey a feeling. In many ways, coming up with a tagline is like writing a poem.

So why software you can touch?

I care about making things that live with us in the world and directly touch our lives, meaning I care more about continued impact than viral reach and tangible experiences than theoretical concepts.

How do you create something that lives with you? Being able to touch it is a good first step. It’s not locked behind glass, isn’t impossible to change, and doesn’t require a lot of prework to understand. It invites curiosity, participation, and ultimately, collaboration.

In Physical media: why we just want to feel something, Tiff writes about how touch is about more than just the moment:

This may be a bit of a stretch but bear with me: to touch is also to be seen. To touch is to ground yourself, to reaffirm your existence. An accidental dog ear, stains from sips of tea, shreds from pages torn out of a notebook all gesture towards some form of human presence. Past or present.

In the past, I’ve centered descriptions of my work around technology for community. I still champion communal computing as one of the guiding pillars for what I build. But what does it even mean to talk about community when the very systems that are tearing us apart from each other wave community around as their core values?

@gqDesigner #MartineRose on the word "community" in fashion. See the full video from '#VirgilAbloh: The Codes' at the link in bio.

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A while ago, a mentor asked me “what does community mean to you?” The problem is that the term has been so overused as to become meaningless. Tech companies sling it around to justify their consolidation of power, and it feels a little silly as a rallying cry when there are masked men stealing community members off the streets across the US.

So instead, we get specific. To touch is also to be seen. To be seen is to become two rather than one. Repeat that motion tens, hundreds of times and a community is formed.

Things we can touch cannot be theoretical. Touch is about intimacy, immediacy, a direct person-to-person connection. It is about breaking through the layers of abstraction, of bureaucracy, containers, and wordy defenses. It’s about piercing a line straight from one heart to another.

My work began with web works and have evolved to include physical internet vessels. I am continuously playing with intimacy and tangibility and how they intersect with us and our devices. Ironically, digital works are surprisingly tangible compared to many physical art pieces. They can often play out on our computers and phones, devices that we touch and immerse ourselves in day after day. It feels personal when we use our devices, an inherent closeness to our lives that isn’t present when we experience technology in a clean setting.

When I wrote touching computers to describe creating a clay vessel to hold my personal website—a body for my digital creation, I thought about touching in two ways.

1. I created a physical body for my digital home that I could touch with my hands and

2. I had an emotionally meaningful experience with a website, through this body.

This physical experience had transformed into an emotional one. And it doesn’t stop at emotional connection. When you become intimate with something, it makes it feel like something you can change. A mental connection is developed—an understanding of how the other behaves in relation to you.

Touch develops connections across our fields of perception: physical, emotional, mental. It disarms us to open up new connections that we didn’t know were possible.

And once we can touch software, we can learn to hold it—turn a single moment into a continued relationship—one that we care for, maintain, and nurture.

Over dinner with Leia, we talked about how we feel about the things we’ve made and the struggle of artists to define ourselves. What is the one question or sentence that captures what we care about? We came up with a few questions to apply to projects to help us identify it.

1. Do you love it?

2. Does it feel like you?

We’ve both published this alignment exercise on our websites (mine, L’s). If you do it yourself, let me know!

I don’t know what caused me to land on this new mantra. There’s no doubt that it’ll likely change over the years, if even that long. But for now, this feels like a culmination of the past few years. Three years to find four words. Life sometimes feels like it moves so slowly, doesn’t it?

UPDATES

1. I’m writing this from the plane on my first business trip to Tokyo. I’ll be here for the next two weeks setting up an exhibition and participating in Future Vision Summit. Afterwards I’ll stick around Shanghai and Shenzhen for a few weeks. If you’re around or have recommendations for artful, interesting, or unusual spaces, let me know!

2. Since I wrote about alive internet theory, which is now my most popular post to date, I created a project by the same name for the Internet Archive’s celebration of a trillion webpages archived. check it out at alivetheory.net

3. The Internet Sculptures shop just closed for the year! I launched the first new product, the Phone Pillow, a pillow that puts your phone to sleep, to a resounding success. thank you for all your support and any new orders will ship out next year :)

This dispatch was sent to 1779 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 27 people who supported my independent work with a sponsorship last month, and a warm welcome to Aadil and Thaddeus.

In the midst of all this uncertainty, many blame AI companies for unleashing the beast. But in the end, those abusing this technology for botting are just playing the game set by the owners of the modern-day internet. Instagram, Reddit, and other major social platforms are built to prioritize audience capture and engagement, not community wellness. The AI is just doing what computers do best—optimizing for a given constraint, and the platforms sell more ads off their virtual backs.

With all this happening, it’s easy to forget there’s still so much life thriving on the open Internet. From rural forums, towns, and fridge walls to community-run encyclopedias and maps, pockets of humanity continue to flourish despite (& perhaps now, in part, in spite) of these existential fears. Messages tossed into the void come back as real friends, collaborators, partners. Strangers meet up spontaneously after shared struggle. Earnestness shines through even in “content” manufactured for spread.

To believe in each other, we must believe in the open Internet.

If dead internet theory posits that the internet will eventually become only bots, alive internet theory proclaims we will never let the open internet die. We will always find a way to look for each other, to answer a call for help, to share a laugh and an argument right after one another. If there’s one trait of the human race that every apocalypse movie agrees on, it’s our will to survive.

But survival doesn’t have to be where we stop. What might happen if we tried to thrive? How can we make the open internet more resilient, vibrant, and collaborative than ever?

When the Internet was first introduced, it felt like a magical place you could visit from the comfort of your home. There was a ritual to enter: checking all the connections, dialing into your service provider, and deciding what website you would start from.

The Internet is still a place, but it’s been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the scrollbar until our eyes bleed.

So what would it take to reclaim the Internet as our space?

Maybe it starts with having places where we can go to just hang out?

Not to status signal, scheme a job, or consume content.

Just a place where we can sit for a while, watch the virtual scenery change, and see cursors flutter by.1

There is a virtual place where this has existed for a long time. As a kid, I loved spending time hanging out in video games like Runescape, just watching the pixelated environment and other players pass on the way to new adventures. We already have so much richness available in the existing environment of the internet. Why can’t we claim it as our public space?

Where can we sit together on the internet? Where do we go for a stroll? Where do we find the digital equivalent of the remote hot spring up in the mountains, or that hidden hike to the waterfall? How do we discover a new neighborhood, shelter under a bodega awning during a summer shower, sit quietly at a cafe and work among the chatter of strangers?

We are all so online, yet being online feels so solitary. I can’t feel the people across the feeds from me. Social media is designed for consumption of content, distribution of branding, broadcasting of prestige, not spontaneous encounters or the warm, funny, and weird moments that happen when humans simply exist together.

But what if we had the tools to reshape it? We could make our own public parks, cafes, bodegas, waterfalls, and mountains. We could carve out spaces that we inhabit and maintain, becoming active stewards rather than just users.

This is why I keep finding myself coming back to playhtml. I’ve been able to imagine and create new ways of being with people online, sharing experiences I’ve never had before. I’m in wacky territory now, where the ideas are messing with fundamental assumptions about how websites and the internet work. I’m not sure if that’s what will lead to this vision, but it feels like it’s in the right direction.

This dispatch was sent to 1651 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 30 people who supported my independent work _with a sponsorship last month.

taken on a spring day at the Skyspace by the de Young

The beauty and effectiveness of the Skyspace lies in curation—a pinhole into the sky set against a backlit white frame turns an everyday sight into something extraordinary. In doing so, it reveals the magician's prestige: how to spot the extraordinary in everything around us. For artists and creatives who have already learned this lesson, it’s easy to apply it in everyday scenarios, to select an interesting part from the whole and focus on it. Before I learned this lesson, I was consumed with capturing the whole and getting everything. When I took photos as a kid, I tried my hardest to fit my entire field of vision—the wider the lens, the more capable I felt. To miss anything felt like I was losing something precious.

Ironically, the opposite is necessary to learn that we should cherish the beauty of little moments. We have to make a part so beautiful that we can’t help but appreciate the whole. When you visit the Skyspace, it gifts you a preciousness that resurfaces every time you look at the sky afterward.

What is the Skyspace for the Internet? How do I create a pinhole to highlight all the little human actions through technology that make me believe in the goodness of people over and over again? How do I show the extraordinary in the swipe of a finger, the tap of a key, the press of a button? How do we start seeing all the people behind those actions, hoping to meet them, believing in them, even, whenever we interact online?

a still from Yi Yi, directed by Edward Yang. A son asks his father about how we can know what each other sees, when we can only see from our own eyes.

When I reflect on personal experiences, I think about the things that have stayed with me long after they happened. I think of Perfect Days and Yi Yi, films that somehow never fail to make me cry no matter how many times I see them for how seen they make me feel. I think about encountering Sarah Sze’s work for the first time, how her sprawling sculptures took my breath away and rewired my brain for how you could think about installation.

Ultimately, what I’m interested in is the ability to widen our aperture, to bring more light in with every look at the world. I’m interested in developing the awareness mid-gaze of what we are perceiving, experimenting with new ways of looking, and planting the seed for that change to spread.

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a screenshot of a typical marketplace in Runescape

I’m trying to think about the first moment that opened my eyes up to the possibility of the internet. Perhaps standing in the crowded square of Runescape with every manner of conversation floating in Comic Sans text above pixelated avatars. Something about the denseness of the text, the low fidelity aesthetic, made me realize that these were actual people. Maybe it was on twitter in 2020 as I found other people who thought like me and were interested in the same weird internet concepts. The first time I read a blog and felt it could have come straight from my brain. I don't know if art can evoke the same feeling as these fleeting, spontaneous lived experiences, but I sure hope to facilitate them in whatever I make.

It's funny that the Runescape example comes up because it houses one of my worst memories of the Internet as well. One day, I met a friendly stranger who offered me a new weapon and proposed we fight some beasts together. The area they had in mind was past the boundary of the Wilderness—an area full of precious loot, along with dangerous monsters and the ability for players to attack each other. I had never been and was scared to death, but it felt like a unique opportunity to try it out. So I put on my best armor and we headed out together. As I crossed the barrier, acknowledging the in-game prompt that described the dangers, I remember thinking: I could lose everything.

And that's exactly what happened. Only a few paces out from the barrier, my new "friend" began attacking me. I froze. I started typing in all caps incoherently, in fear, as I frantically tried to click back towards the entrance. My character fell, and the screen slowly faded to black.

Whenever I remember this experience these days, I wonder what that person is up to now. I wonder how many people they pulled this trick on, what went through their mind as they did their first time. In that moment, I'm sure we were both high on adrenaline, sharing a twisted kind of emotional intimacy.

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a screenshot from Jubilee's Surrounded series that pits one person against 20 people with a different belief system

The popular curation of these kinds of experiences is to represent them as black and white—good and evil. Show these people preying on innocent victims and then create an elaborate scheme to show them a piece of their own medicine. Scamming scammers, highlight reels of dunking on supporters of any establishment figure, and even a catfish version of the Runescape story I shared. There's something incredibly satisfying about these stories. They follow the classic Western template of justice: rewarding good behavior and doling out divine punishment on the bad.

Yet they don't feel like they do anything to change the cycle. In fact, they might add fuel to the fire, turning a small battle into an all-out war.

Recently, I came across a video that shows a different view. In it, a girl shares the voicemail left by a "scammer" who is laughing and blessing her after getting tricked by her voicemail greeting in which she pretends to answer the phone. There's a subversion of the traditional scripts here. The roles of "hero" and "villain" fall away to reveal two people sharing a moment. The narrative becomes messy, real. Perhaps a scammer realizes that he is preying on innocent people. Perhaps we realize that these so-called scammers have families of their own they are trying to support, too. Or nothing changes at all. We are left to wonder with the question, to find the answers ourselves.

I have long described my goal partially as creating “useful art”. What makes something valuable to me is that it deals with how we live, in the real world, in our real lives. I'm not exactly sure how this voicemail example scales into more universal change, but it feels relatable and real. It makes me wonder about how I can reproduce this kind of deviation in my own scam calls. More importantly, just like every time I enter Skyspace, I feel my perception changing in response to it.

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This dispatch was sent to 1634 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 29 people who supported my independent work _with a sponsorship last month, and a warm welcome to Peter and Chris.

In the weeks leading up to it, I shipped a 100lb+ rock from San Francisco, learned to use a CNC on a large corkboard, and created 3 distinctive and expressive tiny social networks.

DEMO2025 is the showcase of the latest work from NEW INC, the New Museum's art and technology incubator. I flew in a week early and spent the weekend prior installing so that everything was ready for the show. It's the largest physical installation I've ever worked: featuring 4 distinct works joined by a single unifying project, Computing Shrines. In parallel, I prepped a 7-minute talk that could give a compelling overview of my creative practice and why it exists.

Afterwards, I couldn't sleep from all the adrenaline coursing through my body, all the conversations running through my head and the ideas branching off from them.

Computing Shrines is a series of site-specific sculptures that co-opt our devices to foster local connection in everyday places. Each shrine connects visitors' phones to a custom communal web interface that facilitates exchange of small intimacies between past and future visitors. Beyond an installation, Computing Shrines is an open protocol for creating public good technology that fosters local connection rather than replacing it. Designed with common materials, open-sourcing the interfaces, and collaborating with local stewards, the project transforms the normally solitary and exclusive act of creating technology into a community improvement project for all to shape.

The installation features three distinct shrines, anchored around Shrine Map, an homage to community bulletin boards featuring a smartphone for each shrine. Two mobile phone booths sit on columns across from each other, inviting visitors to listen and share their worries and hopes with the last and next stranger in Shrine to Voice. Shrine to Earth features a found boulder and rock garden that invites visitors to share photos of rocks they’ve found, which become pieces in a cairn-making mini-game. And in Shrine to Others, a clay tablet nestled beside a seating area invites visitors to notice the people they share the space with and share what they admire about strangers.

In the talk, I described Computing Shrines as a culmination of my practice, and in many ways, it is: the combination of intimate, empowering technology and person-to-person connection & community. But rather than a linear path as we like to interpret stories, it feels more like a perpetual spiral.

All my work provided the foundation for this project, but these projects aren’t mere stepping stones towards this final piece. Instead, I will certainly circle back to them over the years—the different perspectives that lead me to this particular creation. I imagine my work expanding in all directions, like an exploding star rather than climbing a ladder to the top.

Technology that facilitates local connection is important and interesting. But there is still value to purely digital connection, creation, and play. We exist in a web of contradictions—our very existence sometimes feels like one. We are not so simple as to be contained by a single right answer. Instead, I'm seeking answers in plurality, complexity, and the infinite possibilities that the world and other people offer us every day.

It feels weird to show my work in this context—a big production team, curators, photographers, and art handlers. There's an elevated sense of importance, which can be helpful to encourage people to deeply engage (as well as celebrate thework). But there's an artificial feeling that I can't shake—in that this is not the form that I imagine people interacting with my work.

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I want these Shrines to be living out in the world amongst our daily lives. I want them to be nestled in subway stations, neighborhood parks, alleyways and mailboxes, cafes, and sidewalk plant beds. I want them to be a pleasant surprise you stumble into on your regular stroll. I want them to encourage your curiosity—to stoke the wonder that the world coaxes out of you every waking moment.

Still, even in this environment, I noticed the patterns that I hoped for: visitors sneaking away to private corners to listen and record a voice message for a future visitor; people bringing rock offerings and creating their own cairns atop Shrine to Earth; others sitting, lying, and kneeling by Shrine to Others to gaze at the people around them, returning to their phones to record what they notice.

I wander around and try to hear people's honest reactions. A few have trouble accessing the website. Others light up about how cool it is. Universally, I observe curiosity and a desire to learn more. When I share the background and hope behind the idea, I see their faces change as they "get it" and start applying the framework in their own histories and homes. They imagine shrines on airplanes, beside conference seats, at local cafes, set into random street walls, hanging from a street-level window—a vision of technology situated to physical contexts and that empowers us to learn about, and thus, form trust with, those around us.

I watch as the possibilities expand and multiply, and they slowly grow the conviction to host one of their own, to take technology into their own hands and shape it in a way that can engage with people at an unexpectedly meaningful level.

I'm looking for others to grow this project with me next! Message or email me (spencer@spencer.place) if you're interested in hosting a Shrine in your own neighborhood or work together on one for your organization. I'd love for these to be a way for local businesses to host art experiences that also facilitate connection within their communities.

Seeing all the energy around the protests in the U.S. against the indiscriminate and brutal detainments by ICE, I'm reminded of the ends for which I do my work. This kind of gathering, solidarity, and collective demand & fight for change is what I believe technology offers potential to empower. We already see it in clever creations that facilitate the organizing of these kinds of events, secure communication during, and systems to disrupt institutional control. People are using their diverse social media audiences to bring attention to these issues and host gatherings in solidarity even when they can't attend physically.

This level of commitment doesn't appear instantly. People aren't convinced of a cause or their need to participate overnight. These movements, for a world where everyone can live a dignified life, or, in short, a better world for all, happen slowly over decades and even centuries. With every generation, we move the needle further on our notions of equality and liberty and get closer to this fleeting idea of truth.

And importantly, I believe these movements can't flourish solely through these serious, radical actions like protests, facts, and resistance. These are all essential factors, but we need a foundation where we are willing to stand up for our neighbors, to risk ourselves for a greater cause. I believe this foundation forms through lightness—joy, play, boredom. We must say hi to each other at the coffee shop, lend out groceries and tools to our neighbors, and play and joke with each other before we can form the trust to fight together.

Creating space for joy and play is as radical as creating space for protest and solidarity. In fact, they might circle each other in one single spiral. At least, that's what my hypothesis is.

My talk focused on this paradox of perpetual energy that I seek through all my work. It reminded me of the title of this newsletter: spencer's paradoxes. I've always felt drawn to holding contradictions in balance as a means to get closer to some deeper truth. I like playing with ideas, experimenting with provocations, designing things that cause people to say “what if?” a thousand times over. A question mark is the seed of change, so let's plant some more questions in each other's hearts and go looking for the answers together.

Recent Updates

• optional support I've decided to enable optional paid subscriptions for this newsletter! I already run an optional sponsorship program with Github, but I've gotten feedback from people having to make an account to support me. If you're an existing sponsor (or you have Github and would like to support there), don't worry—you'll be automatically associated with a free "paid" subscription on here for any bonus behind-the-scenes work I publish. Have ideas for what would be fun to offer to supporters while keeping most of my content free? I'd love to hear.

• workshops in New York I'm hosting two "Touching Computers" workshops this week to make interactive NFC objects: one will be creating them out of meaningful objects we own with Munus Shih and the other will be my first event designed for children and their parents working with clay with Irena Wang and her son Luka.

• Show closes June 22nd Starting around 4pm I'll be in the space to host walkthroughs and a small celebration. come if you're around! You can also watch the talk I gave on Youtube, and learn more about the project on the case study published by APOSSIBLE.

• website update I quite like how this bottom row of my personal website is turning out! The “stats” box with the little colors for people brings me a lot of joy

  

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This dispatch was sent to 1559 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron or subscribing for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress)

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Charles, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, Brandon, and one anonymous donor.

My daily average is 4 hours, higher than it's been the past. I suppose all my recent practice creating social content1 is taking its toll: it entails both lots of time filming and also lots of time consuming to understand the different storytelling mechanisms people use. It's hard to do so without getting sucked in. Minutes turn into hours and, for some, whole spans of lives are lost to endless scrolling.

A Pew survey in 2011 asked people for one word they would use to describe their smartphones (at that point around 42% of people who owned a cellphone owned a smartphone). As of 2024, Pew has recorded over 90% of people owning a smartphone. While they haven't repeated the question of asking for a single word to describe their phones, we don't need a survey to see that our distaste for our phones as a society is reaching a fever pitch.

States all across the U.S. are implementing Phone-Free policies, screen-time and focus aids that block access to apps are wildly popular on app stores, and viral content (how ironic) about ditching phones and acquiring "dumb" phones are trending2. Many smart people are making alternative devices that package all the useful capabilities of a smartphone into a less distracting and less extractive package. What would the word cloud say now if we asked people?

I'm not surprised how opinion has shifted on our phones. I feel the same exhausting tension even seeing my phone out of the corner of my eye as I write this essay on my computer. I am on my phone too much. I scroll more than feels good. My attention span has definitely suffered.

Our phones: these supercomputers in our pockets, these demons on our shoulders, these portals to entire worlds sitting in our palms. Their rise to ubiquity has confused more than a few people and our existing definitions of technology. Are they computers? Are apps the Internet? Where do we end and the phone begin?

But it's not all bad. Otherwise, we wouldn't keep coming back. I find incredible things on the Internet, through my phone, every day. I am filled with wonder, inspiration, joy, curiosity, and laughter trawling through the various corners of the web. I am filled with these feelings, mostly, by other people sharing pieces of themselves on the internet, finding a way to express themselves in this cyborg language that fills the negative space around our physical lives.

If we live as beings of matter, perhaps our digital lives live as dark matter. People say that the digital doesn't feel tangible, but the digital has embedded itself in most parts of my life—blogs I've read have shaped my way of living, digital avatars I met have become some of my closest friends, and inspirational work I came across formed the seed of what has become my lifelong creative practice.

What about the phone, the object, itself—what about the chunk of metal and glass you carry with you every day?

As a physical subject, the phone takes on a new light. I turn the screen off and examine the round curves and precise studded holes that mark the speakers. I press its tactile buttons, test the varying pressure thresholds, and listen to the distinctive clicks. I tap the screen to wake it up and pay attention to the nature of its light. I consider which parts of the iconography and text might constitute its face and which its body. I consider what name it might want me to call it by. I listen for its breath and heartbeat. Would it feel nice to buzz with a new notification? Does it feel powerful to shine its flashlight? Will it understand fear when the battery drops dangerously low? What kind of drug does getting charged most closely resemble?

These phones are some of our most intimate companions—we have touched them more than most of our loved ones and lovers, likely combined. They have seen us at our lowest and our highest. They capture our meaningful moments and help us reach those who can comfort us when we feel the most alone. They are always there for us when we need to celebrate our latest wins or when we need to numb ourselves to the world through the flood of content.

My resentment of what I do on it and what it makes me feel like seems silly under this frame. Like a longtime friend, sometimes we have difficult fights, but in the end, we're there for each other.

everyday is my latest work that emerged from the height of these tensions. It's a participatory work that lives on your phone and composes scores of gestures, representing people all over the world dancing with their phones to hourly prompts.

I wanted to make something that could play with this strange state of affairs. something that captures a brief flashing moment in time, that might be obsolete at some point soon in the future, as our devices constantly change (and the mobile device APIs that web browsers expose). I learned about so many obscure sources of information you could access from a phone, and how few consensus there was across different phones and browsers on which ones were allowable.

Some devices allow you to get a person's heartbeat (using the fingerprint sensor). Others grant permission for system-level information like your battery levels. A few actively discourage any information access outside of native applications. In the end, the kinds of things we can do with our mobile companions is still dictated entirely by the priorities of a few companies.

I had a lot of fun considering what strange rituals we could conduct with our devices—both using the phone for its physical body rather than what it represents and as the constant companion in our lives. For example, at noon, it asks you to "Catch a ray of sunlight with your phone," and later at 6pm, it asks you to "Treat your device as your dance partner." Phone as mirror, as dance partner, each hour invites you to reimagine these everyday companions as sources of play, exploration, and reflection.

In the end, I wanted each action to be an invitation to connect with someone else, to turn these devices that so often isolate us from the world and each other, into conversation starters—both with the people in the physical spaces around us, watching us do absurd dances to our phones, and those around the world, connected to us in a brief moment of strange dance and movement.

If our phones can be demons, they can be angels, too. Or jesters, magicians, personal trainers. They have just as much agency to reinvent themselves, if we allow them to. Who do you want your phone to be? And who do you want to be when you're with it?

Updates

1. DEMO 2025 I'll be sharing new work for the conclusion of my time in NEW INC at DEMO 2025. Come see my talk on June 4th or the show June 4-22nd if you're in NYC :)

2. Asian Art Museum I'm boothing (for the first time) for the Asian Art Museum's Spring Fair May 2-4 from 10AM to 5:30PM. Come say hi! I'm excited to see Yuan Goang-Ming's new work in the museum too

This dispatch was sent to 1200 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

the underside of a large leaf at the Conservatory of Flowers

It's been quiet in my writing brain the past few weeks. I've been busy making, figuring out how to juggle a several different moving pieces at once while keeping my mind quiet and my hands steady. I don't do well with frenetic energy—I find it jumbles up momentum, scatters it into pieces that you find yourself looking for in a daze in between switches. I feel a bit like the hummingbirds I sometimes see outside the window of my office, fluttering for a moment in front of one branch and darting to another. Are they present for every moment? Do they remember when they revisit branches? I wonder if they have any advice to give to me.

Driving back from coworking in the mission today, I experienced an exceptionally above-average amount of anger. One man honked at me intermittently for the 5-10 seconds I waited for someone to cross the street to turn. Then, as I stopped to pick up a stool from the side of the road, a woman started screaming at me to get out of her driveway—honking, cursing, and threatening to tow, all the while. L notes all the unresolved rage that manifests on the road. People swerving between lanes, trying to save several extra seconds or even a minute or two getting to where they're trying to go. Where does it all come from and where does it all go?

It makes me angry. Angry, of course, at being yelled at unjustifiably (to my perspective), but more encompassing, angry at the entire situation, the cycle, the pointlessness of it all. More than angry, it makes me sad: this burden that so many carry with them and pass onto unsuspecting others, perpetuating a cycle of mischanneled rage and illwill. The fact that some swerving and honking in a car is one of the few places where they feel enough agency to process their emotions.

I wonder why I feel so affected by this as I finish my ride home. I think it's the opposite parallel of how comforted I feel when I experience or witness surprisingly warm encounters among people—whether strangers forming an instant connection over something silly or the little everyday acts of care, from a smile on the street to a nice word at the cafe. I feel so affected because these cycles of misdirected rage and fear and vengeance feel like the antithesis of everything I stand for and everything I work towards with my practice.

Last week, I saw the launch of this app, branding itself as "Uber for guns." The post author is known for creating extremely viral social apps that quickly become acquired (mostly for their data and other scraps as the virality fades). They consult as a "consumer, social, and growth expert" and their calls start at $2800/hr.

https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1891685562412675284

My first reaction was "we live in a dystopia." This is a prime example of a system that accelerates and perpetuates everything that made me so sad and angry in my driving experience. The marketing is slick and leverages all the latest trending social devices to go viral. Their hero content features a couple of influencers sharing their experience calling "Protectors" to pick them up from LAX and drive them around for a day of sightseeing. It hits the right balance of absurd casual that makes for a viral video formula, featuring tall men in suits and earpieces escorting them picturesque LA spots in Cadillacs. Their social media pages feature professional portraits featuring assured, powerful men with sharp jawlines and straight backs in matching suits. Clicking in reveals a video where they talk to the camera about their past military and law enforcement experience, with a rotating slideshow of heroic images from their experiences. Each is captioned "<NAME> is a Protector." On their lapels, you see small red pins featuring the company's logo. Red: for power, or maybe for the blood that they are prepared to shed in defense. They have several other videos commenting on the United Healthcare CEO killing, showing how things could have been different if only they had been around.

The messaging capitalizes on fear, sharpens it into a spearhead to drive people to enter their hyper-optimized onboarding flow. Their UX is equal parts fun and streamlined, designed to maximize things that would be a hit on social while eliminating distractions. For example, you can swipe through a token Security Service-looking Protector in different outfits to customize how they come dressed. The dystopia is not climate change or nuclear war—it's when summoning guns into everyday society becomes as fun as playing a video game.

Taking all this in, I try to think about how to describe the intensity of my emotion. Disbelief. Rage. Disgust. The app proliferates with the rise of crime. The app addresses our fear through suppression, by putting more guns out onto our streets, creating a wealth gap for who deserves safety, creating a cool aura around being someone who can feel untouchable. To put as many systems in place where we live in a world free from fear, and free from the connection found in each other, too.

They promise something they can't give: safety from all the turmoil in the world. Like all the large platforms of technology, it seizes a death grip on one of our most vulnerable emotions and presents a neatly packaged solution at a reasonable market price. Their solution appears to address all the issues, but the trick, the prestige, is that it solves symptoms while perpetuating the system that produces the problem. After all, if they eliminated their problem, where would their business go?

The worst part is that it feels like everything is designed to be controversial. They know being provocative yields engagement, and engagement yields the kind of curve you need to show venture capital investors. The people deriding it (myself included) are just accelerating their efforts. All of it fills me with a rage that I don't know what to do with.

a rotating flower arrangement we keep on the windowsill next to our kitchen sink

So what to do with this rage?

Every once in a while, I zoom out at the state of the world and feel bewildered by how we live in this state. So many people stuck working bullshit jobs that they hate, so many people lacking basic necessities while billions of dollars go towards inconsequential or actively harmful ends, so much hate and exploitation when life already offers so much love and bounty.

I don't know the answer—I just have my working answer that allows me to continue on.

I think about circles expanding outwards. Most immediately, taking care of yourself, doing something that fulfills you, giving yourself enough rest. And slowly expanding outwards, contributing to your community, making small differences in the days of those around you. And using all those experiences to think about how our systems should change, how they could work for us rather than against us. What kind of world do we want to live in? What kinds of behaviors should be encouraged? Who do you want kids to look up to growing up?

For me, it means committing to my health as just as important as my creative practice and my community. It means cultivating the handmade, personal, loving internet and computing that I see every day when I watch people use their devices. It means making things dedicated to that love and things that make it easier for us to create spaces and technology that feels like this, overflowing with the humanity inherent to all artificial creations. It means appreciating art that I love, telling people when their works touch me, supporting independent creators giving their own answer to the question. It means smiling at the people I walk by, supporting peers in my community, showing up for friends, stopping at the neighbor's house to chat about their garage sale and help them move something heavy up the stairs. It means treating every day as a new chance to give another answer, to do my part in actualizing the kind of world I hope for in my dreams.

This dispatch was sent to 1282 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

I feel a deep nostalgia for objects and places. I'm obsessed with all the history they hold, especially when their lifetimes may be several times our own. We encounter so many things in our daily lives that have seen much more than we have. Whenever I visit a place with history, I try to picture scenes that happened so long ago in the same place. If I listen closely, I can feel their energy communicating with me.

Maybe that's why I'm obsessed with finding faces in objects. I have a whole Are.na collection dedicated to them (curated with Gather of course).

It's definitely a romantic notion. It takes a certain faith and a certain hope to look for meaning beyond the current reality. You have to be a dreamer, to be open to letting your imagination lead you into precarious positions, teetering1 between the real and imaginary.

My latest project, Field Companions is an ode to this romantic feeling. It's a dedication to the desire to hoard, to hold onto the memory of our objects, to listen to the earth.

Field Companions are a collection of everyday objects that I've transformed into interactive sculptures, imbued with the agency to share their stories. Found stones from meaningful locations have had centers carved out and replaced with a portal to a 1-min audio memory from the moment they were found. Tapping your phone to this "soul" initiates an interactive web experience that captures a mini time capsule of its history.

(A limited first collection of 25 from 5 different locations is available on Metalabel as they graciously invited me to be an artist for their FW2024 collection.)

This idea is an extension of my initial exploration of embedding NFCs with site-specific websites into objects to create computers you can touch. I wanted to see how I could apply the same concept to things that already exist. But embedding computational capabilities into things that already exist is just a small drop compared to if manufacturing changes to start embedding everyday things with computation.

What do our lives look like when this is taken to the extreme and becomes the norm, when every barcode and label is suddenly a computer chip? And is this the kind of world that we even want?

We seem to be at or near a threshold point with this kind of everyday technology entering popular culture. Since COVID, contactless payments have grown exponentially, doubling twice from 2019-2023. I've never seen so much public awareness around people customizing NFCs for use in their daily lives. TikToks showing tutorials and life hacks using NFCs to automate your life have millions of views.

IYK is a company that makes its own branded NFC chips loaded with mini-apps for specific purposes (like saving memories or sending a video message). I like the concept of these mini experiences, but I can't say I don't feel some wariness given they're backed by a16z's crypto arm.

Nintendo has also been sneaking NFC technology into the hands of kids through their amiibo, interactive figurines that can connect to their video game consoles. These little toys can unlock characters, equipment, and even custom data. I love the social behavior that this platform enables: I can share my favorite game assets with my friends by bringing over my amiibo.

Computation is seeping into our surroundings. More and more objects around us are becoming enchanted. But while the technology is becoming more available, the experience is still rough at the edges and can be unpredictable. Sometimes scanning tags involves a juggling act of moving your phone around until it hits the sweet spot.

Still, we seem to crave this physical intimacy with our technology. It seems to stem from the interpersonal tension with our phones—these all-powerful devices that seem to steal our time and energy even as they enable so much of our daily functionality. These physical-digital experiences are a path for redemption for our devices. They offer surprise and whimsy, a joy that we forgot we could have.

Even though the experience feels new and cutting edge, the feeling we get from it feels nostalgic, reminiscent of an old internet (or at least our experience with it when we were younger), when going on the internet meant playing a dumb game or reading a poorly designed site rather than wading through optimized flows and corporate-speak-pretending-to-be-hip copy.

The other day on Bluesky (follow me I'm optimistically transitioning from Twitter to it), I asked about devices that inspire joy in a home. Suzanne recommended Cube World to me, and I was blown away by the demos2. R also sent me this video of Pixel Chix, made by the same company, which seems to be mostly the same thing but marketed to girls and more intense Tamagotchi-like gameplay. For a Kernel Magazine launch event, Jacky and I had ideated a communal mobile Gashapon that required putting two phones together and pulling an on-screen handle down at the same time to trigger an exchange of digital files from your device (unfortunately Web NFC is still in experimental mode and we couldn't actually make it).

image credit Reddit

The combinatorial possibilities that these toys hint at make me think of the magic of things like Conway's Game of Life: simple interface mechanics that enable a seemingly limitless set of interactions. This limitless possibility is what makes the real world so exciting. Every day you can discover something new from a particular reflection at a time of day to what makes little wind cyclones form and the kinds of patterns that form when rain races across a windshield. What if our digital worlds could offer this too?

Rather than captors of our attention, I hope our phones feel like portals to this possibility one day. Where you could discover a game someone made by offering your phone at your favorite park bench, or retrieve someone's last played playlist in the window seat on the bus, or receive a compliment while grabbing a coffee from your local cafe. I dream of a day when our devices feel like facilitators in forming in-person communities: where the limitless possibility of our physical worlds meets the infinite expanse of our digital worlds. I dream of a day where the internet feels real, human because of each other.

Updates & Asks

• I teased a "patron/sponsor" benefit of a bi-weekly raw audio dump & discussion thread of the latest of my thinking and research for my sponsors, and i'm going to do a free test run this weekend! I'm thinking about either combining this with Substack's paid tier (for non-Github users) or just centralizing it all to something like Patreon(?) If you have thoughts on this, please let me know (like if you would support but Github is too big of a barrier). As a reminder, all my writing is and will always be free and public, and my sponsors enable me to do that and the rest of my independent work.

• I am experimenting more with AT Protocol and Bluesky! I'm in the process of making something to explore the links being posted in real-time

• I'll be part of an experimental 24-hour livestream / net performance that thing.tube is hosting! It'll be streaming December 29 from 12:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. EST. Put it on in a corner while you celebrate the holiday season with your family?

• S & I's new office / workshop is coming together... I'm looking for essential tools that you find yourself reaching for again and again in your work space. What do you recommend?

This dispatch was sent to 1189 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and sponsoring me if you have the means.

Thank you to the 25 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, Greg, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

'Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978’, Francesca Woodman, 1975-8 | Tate taken from this Are.na block by Hiroaki Yamane

Motion creates new resting states. I think of the Big Bang and turning a snow globe upside down. A state of flux makes space for transitioning into a new state of being.

Saturday night, before I flew out, I took a field trip from where I was staying in Brooklyn up to Times Square at 11PM. I watched people come and go from the subway car, revelers on their way to Halloween celebrations, late-night commuters headed home, and those, seemingly searching for an answer to a question they haven't asked, staring off into the distance, earbuds shutting off the world.

I emerged from the station and made my way towards the beacon of light emanating from the square. The area feels like the equivalent of an urban midnight sun. Rather than natural light, the trash-filled streets radiate with the blue glow of millions of pixels and flashing animation.

Times Square is not designed for free motion. It is, instead, optimized for maximal brand engagement. From the massive screens that barrel between 15-second ads to the storefronts with flashing window displays, everything screams "Look at me!!" with an urgent fervor. Barricades are set up around the public art sculptures and stanchions designate waiting areas to get your moment of fame recorded on the big screens. It's weird. Everything around you is moving at a blinding pace, but you aren't allowed to move. Maybe that's the illusion that the space wants you to believe—to think that your freedom comes from the brands and spaces that tease you with flight.

At 11:57pm, exactly 3 minutes before midnight, a vintage black-and-white countdown slowly took over every screen. For the next three minutes, each screen shimmered with a soft blur, ebbing and flowing between a range of muted colors and sharpness. Amorphous blobs danced with shadows and textured curves twinkled. The square grew dark as the screens, which previously screamed with color and animation at maximum brightness, transformed into the soft glow of a home laptop in the dark—more like a paper lamp than an artificial sun. It felt like a digital eclipse—casting the world into darkness for a few brief moments.

~11:58PM during the performance in the middle of Times Square

Around me, people snapped pictures while exclaiming "what the fuck is happening right now?" (much like I imagine people who first see a solar eclipse react). At the end of the three minutes, the screens promptly returned to their regular reel of ads, and some said "that was it?"

That was it. And that pause and break from the normal is all that artist Olafur Eliasson intended with his piece, Lifeworld. In an artist talk the night before, he talked about his desire for spaces that allow for uncertainty and doubt so that people are invited to co-produce the space. Having been in lots of technologist circles that that center agency as the goal of critical technologies, it was surprising to encounter an internationally-recognized artist claim and champion collective agency so prominently in their work.

My own work is deeply interwoven with collective agency. I think the goal of my creative practice is to figure out how to enable grassroots collective agency at scale through both cultural changes and infrastructure changes (both making people aware of what that agency feels like and why they deserve it and creating the tools and foundations to actually realize that agency).

I was curious how effective Olafur's approach would be as a fine-arts approach. The entire premise for this art project is dependent on a twisted set of circumstances. After all, his work is critiquing the very premise of Times Square and the industries that power it, yet the Times Square Art Commission is officially sponsoring this work. It reminds me of Terry Allen's Corporate Head statue, created outside an EY office in Los Angeles1.

image credit Public Art Archive

I wished they had been able to negotiate longer than 3 minutes with Times Square because there wasn't enough time to experience the piece and people's reactions, but that bewildered moment—that "what the fuck" I heard—is a powerful start for any work.

One day while riding the subway I shared a profound moment with a tourist couple's baby. He was standing on the edge of the seat near where I was holding the railing, and suddenly, we met eyes for a deep gaze. From then on, we kept staring at each other. He tried to communicate (in French, so unsuccessfully), so we only had our eyes and hands to talk to each other with. Despite our brief exchange, part of me feels like I know them now.

I spontaneously began an experiment for the rest of the week. While riding public transit, I studied the eyes of strangers around me and tried to avoid looking away if they met my eyes. This was... terrifying, to be frank. As someone who is always afraid of making others uncomfortable, I had to fight every urge to look away. And in return, I found the soul of New York—watching eyes of people of all ages, sizes, colors.

It was a simple experiment, but it felt significant because I gave myself permission to play with strangers in a small and harmless way. Play has mostly been eliminated from our public spaces, and we're afraid of each other. I want to try more experiments that are consequentially harmless but still dance at this boundary of connection (reply with any ideas!).

There are ways to create collective agency in small practices such as these, too. Simple, small trends are the first step in popular culture, actively rewiring our collective consciousness.

Motion and pauses. The interplay between them is what leads to change. Agency often comes in sudden step changes rather than linear increases. Whenever I travel, I find myself caught in a whirlwind of plans and faces and inspiration. I feel overstimulated in the best ways. And then when I return to my home, I hermit and pause and reflect. I whirlwind my mind's snow globe, pause the falling snow, and consider their trajectories.

The throughline of the works I'm documenting here is interventions. Works that interrupt and subvert our everyday expectations to prod us into considering their place in our lives. Practices that break the mundane continuity of commonplace moments and offer us connection in the most unexpected of places. Pregnant pauses that trigger a flurry of life changes.

Are you moving or are you paused?

Recent Updates

• TEACHING I'm co-teaching an online class in January for the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC)! it’s called Gift Interfaces and explores how you can incorporate reciprocity in traditional product design to create experiences people care about and of course, we’ll practice different kinds of gifts for our loved ones & communities. There’s a ton of great offerings every season (ive taken two before!). Applications close this weekend!

• OBJECTS I released a batch of holiday edition fortune webstones, featuring the ability to leave a gift message for the recipient, and the shop has a new logo by my friend Song You

  

• EXPERIMENT I'm going to try out an experiment for my sponsors where I do a weekly/bi-weekly 10-15 min walk & talk sharing in-progress work and what's on my mind. Also considering a Discord for supporters :) If you're a sponsor, get in touch so I can add you (github doesn't give me everyone's email..) and if you aren't, is this something you'd find valuable?

  • Also trying to figure out a better platform to handle this.. I’d ideally like to use substack’s audio feature.. but then i guess I would have to add a paid tier rather than using github? advice/preferences/thoughts?

This dispatch was sent to 1143 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and sponsoring me if you have the means.

Thank you to the 26 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Jasmine, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, Greg, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

Isamu Noguchi's Playscapes in Atlanta (image source Herman Miller)

I love when people just going about their normal lives suddenly become the focus of attention.

I visited L the other day at work. They had just started their job at the Exploratorium, which describes itself as a "museum of science, technology and arts." It's filled with interactive installations that illustrate how the natural world works, from pendulums and springs to lasers and reflections.

As we wandered around, I saw an old man attempt to blow a huge bubble out of a metal ring and break into a huge smile when it popped in his face. I watched a grandmother, mother, and daughter make funny faces at each other in front of a massive NASA mirror. I saw a teenager walk up to an exhibit, eyes going wide, twirling around the room, taking it all in. They reached out to touch the installation, so captivated by the experience that they tuned out the docent's voice telling them not to touch.

It suddenly became clear to me that the Exploratorium, for all its magical experiences, is about showing people. You would probably still enjoy going to the Exploratorium alone, but it really comes to life when you experience these tiny moments of curiosity together with everyone around you.

Artworks that incorporate audience participation are described as "participatory art." Wikipedia defines it as "an approach to making art which engages public participation in the creative process, letting them become co-authors, editors, and observers of the work."

The Exploratorium probably wouldn't use this term to describe their work, but contemporary artists do think about this actively.

In July, I visited the Tate Modern's solo retrospective of Yoko Ono. I've long admired the conceptual simplicity and emotional impact of her works. Her launch into the art world starts from her time in Fluxus^[1], one of the first groups to pioneer "conceptual art." For an idea of what this means, works included Alison Knowles' Make a Salad (chopping a salad to the beat of live music and serving it to the audience), Nam June Paik's Zen for Film (an 8-minute short film of unprocessed film), and Ono's Cut Piece (a performance piece in which audience members are invited to cut pieces of Ono's clothing).

Zen for Film (source) and Cut Piece (source)

In her show at the Tate, the gallery was alive with people's actions, both present and past. Painting to Hammer a Nail provided a hammer and nails and asked you to hammer a piece of your hair into the frame. Wish Tree instructed visitors to write a wish and tie it to trees in the lobby. Bag Piece invited visitors to perform in the space by doing "whatever [they] want" (as the docent answered when we asked what was allowed) after putting on a large black canvas bag^[2].

I can't find any documentation of this online now, but the original instructions for this piece say something like enter bag, take all clothes off, put all clothes back on, exit bag. So that's exactly what S and I did after we got in.

It was a really strange feeling, to say the least. From seeing others perform, your brain knows that you can't see into the bag. However, the first thing you notice when you go under, is that you can see out of the bag and watch everyone staring at you performing. So it feels like everyone is watching you strip into your underwear.

This piece probably had the most pronounced effect on me of all the ones in the show. It changed my agency in a significant way—pushing me to act in a way that I would never have dared to act in a similar setting without it, and my mind feels permanently rewired as a result of it.

Broadly, all participatory art tries to engender some kind of public play. The goal is to create an environment where we feel safe enough to play with actions that we might not normally consider.

When applied at a community scale, we see the compounding effects that these practices can have. Mutual aid fridges make it feel normal to redistribute your extra food to people in need. Little Free Libraries create an environment where it's easy to exchange books with neighbors. Every piece of public participatory art gives us the excuse to try on a new normal.

How people use these environments depends a lot on their constraints.

The Portal, a circular real-time video screen connecting Dublin, Ireland and New York City, was shut down for 6 days due to "inappropriate behavior."^[3] It relaunched with the installment of 24-hour security in New York as well as blurring the live stream if people approached with phones.

Ideally, we find ways to make communal participatory experiences that don't require this kind of heavy-handed authority yet still encourage "good" behavior.

These participatory sites are effectively games: designing a controlled environment and narrative for players to experience a new range of agency. The key difference is that you can't make anyone play as someone else in real life. We have to meet them where they are and convince them of the desired behavior.

In my practice, which emphasizes participation, I've tried to move beyond the participatory to foster solidarity, inviting visitors to not only shape the work themselves but also create their own works and versions of the technology. I want to create environments that are shaped by the acts of the people who visit them, thereby highlighting our human experience through a specific human's experience. And I want to also provide the infrastructure that empowers visitors to steward and propagate that experience in the future within their own communities.

I think deeply about the spectrum of participation in digital spaces. So many of our digital experiences are devoid of other people's presence. Every day, we scroll past hundreds of people and stories, but they feel more like ghosts than real people. We're missing the texture that comes from live interactions. We need spaces that allow us to express ourselves more richly—digital playgrounds.

Mindy Seu, an author, designer, and artist championing cyberfeminism, has been experimenting with a participatory lecture that plays out on everyone's phone at the same time through Instagram stories. This format hijacks our devices as facilitators for a collective performance and redefines the significance of the everyday action of clicking through social media content.

VJYourself!, a work by playmodes studio, features a magic mirror that plays back snapshots of visitors' movements in a mosaic-like collage. I experienced a small version of the work in Portland last month and was blown away by how it invited strangers to dance together in front of a mirror, figuring out new ways to combine compositions together.

The key, I think, in all of these experiences that makes them feel good is that there's a balance between players feeling ownership in their actions while nudging them to notice or do something they otherwise wouldn't. Something encourages the player to go from a lurker to an active participant. And hopefully, they leave with a greater sense of agency that they can then impart onto their broader community.

There's an art to creating an environment that makes people comfortable co-creating a space. I’m still trying to crack it, but I’m excited that there’s so much inspiration to learn from.

What have you noticed in the participatory art you've encountered? Are there everyday practices that we can do that promote these kinds of spaces? What's one of your favorite public play encounters?

Updates

1. Welcome to all the new subscribers! We're now over 1000 subscribers :) shout out to all the ones who have been here since day one. I encourage you to be an active participant and treat our comments sections as a space for public play too

2. I launched my first ever shop for the interactive, computing-infused ceramics I've been working on. I've got 2 pieces left before I’m sold out on this round and will likely prepare one more batch this year for holiday season! If your company or organization is interested in a custom commission or collab, let me know!

3. I'm a member of the NEW INC Art & Code cohort this year. I'm excited to be visiting New York a lot more this year and scheming my largest installation work to date!

This dispatch was sent to 1078 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and sponsoring me if you have the means.

Thank you to the 26 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Jasmine, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, Greg, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Song, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

At the Are.na spring cleaning I hosted, we discovered that we all shared one thing in common: none of us had a full-time job. Instead, P & T compared themselves to "professional sidemissioners," people who always have a project but never have a job.

Most people are on a side quest these days (or yearning for the freedom to pursue them), whether that "side quest" is their life's work or simply some time to rest from the daily grind of a 9-5. With the continuing loss of trust in any sort of institution to provide a stable existence, much less a nurturing one, lots of us are in some form of employment instability or looking for an exit. Everyone wants to be free.

When I started my "professional" sidequest last year, I phrased it as a chapter of independence. I was breaking free from my corporate bonds and making space for my creative desires. People I met commended my bravery to be nontraditional and commit to myself.

There's a romanticism in the "myth of the lone genius" that lives on in the modern age filled with independent creatives and solo makers. "Doing your own thing" and going indie signal an unshakeable confidence in your abilities. People dream of toiling away on a game for years on end like ConcernedApe, the maker of Stardew Valley, and becoming an overnight success.

"All it took was nearly life-ruining levels of obsessiveness"
(from the above profile of Eric Barone AKA ConcernedApe)

But there are real (and honestly, necessary) "marketing" benefits that come with this branding. How else can indie, mostly solo devs compete with triple-A game studios and venture-backed startups?

How do we set expectations, and ask for help, without leaving out all the people who have made our work possible?

Even when you do want to make space for all the people and communities that have enabled your accomplishments, many systems don't provide space to acknowledge them publicly. We can send them thanks in private and make personal dedications to them, but how do we make them part of the work as much as we are?

As the year progressed, I became more intimately aware of how much I did was inextricably tied to and made possible by someone else. Even as I spent hours on end nurturing ideas and cultivating them into public projects, they would've been meaningless without the community who gave me early feedback and decided to bet on (and believe in) me.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say I owe so much of my current art practice to Max and Shelby of the HTML Review taking a chance on me & giving space to show html garden. This work led to my first encounter with the physical installation of internet art and formed a foundation for finding my unique artistic voice. Kristoffer's highlighting of my work has connected me with several supporters and collaborators. My partner and close friends have given me so much detailed feedback that helps what I do connect meaningfully with people.

This story repeats over and over for so much of the work I've been able to do throughout the past year. Friends giving me feedback, collaborating with me, and supporting my work with not only an unshakeable belief in the importance of it, but also materially connecting me to the right opportunities and people to make it possible to continue.

And most of it has started from the courage to ask for help and the dedication to honoring and returning the gift.

from https://twitter.com/spencerc99/status/1790630845109399858

Last week, I released Gather, an offline-enabled multimedia collections app that connects to Are.na. It's the first time I've explicitly asked for monetary support for something I've made, and I was terrified to do so. It's not required, simply a nudge of the labor that went into the app's creation and the maintenance required to keep it alive1.

Instead of charging a recurring subscription which is common practice for most software, even the kind that doesn't require much continual upkeep or incur big variable costs (and is a practice that is universally hated), I decided to ask for a one-time contribution for Gather (that is completely optional) for its development2.

The contribution screen is the last part in the "setup" flow. The default is $13 and the scale ranges from $3-$60.

I decided to share my story and bring the people using Gather into my community. I wanted them to understand how much, not only their contribution, but their very use of the app was part of this interdependence. That I wasn't just a faceless company that doesn't care who signs up for their app outside of how they contribute to the revenue figures. I wanted them to know that each contribution had a face on it—one I would personally cherish.

I didn't have much expectations. I figured just a few people would donate, and that would be that3. But the response has been incredible. Over 70 people have contributed something to use Gather, with an average payment of ~$11. There are less than 300 people signed up for the beta now, so it comes out to around 1/3 of the people using the app contributed something. It's more than I could have hoped for, and it's making me dream of a world where this might sustain my living expenses for a couple of months.

Every time I am shocked by the willingness of people to help you when you ask for it. The community will support you if you ask them to. It will hold you if you open yourself to being held.

Every day of this "independent" life further cements my belief that the network (as in mycelium) is everything. Everything I'm able to accomplish is made possible by someone else. I've started to depart from "independent" as a classifier and reaching instead for "indie" to distinguish myself from being supported through traditional employment at a company.

"We want independence, yes, but also interdependence."
from https://www.interdependence.online/

Even as I say this, it's hard to change my language to reflect it. It's easy to think that I'm on my own and feel guilty about all the work I'm not able to do. That it's weak or even incompetent to ask for help. I even titled my reflection about a year of this freedom "a year of independence."

One place that has always held space for the gratitude of indie makers is the Acknowledgements section lodged at the end of works, from writing to websites. I love reading through these letters wherever I find them to see how others manage to capture the gratitude for everyone in their lives who helped make their work possible. Do they acknowledge every single person who believed in them, critiqued their work, shared time with them, brought some tea or gave them a hug during the hardest moments? How can you capture all your gratitude in a single space?4 I love seeing the personal, inside-joke messages that weave between the lines, how the author's writing voice starts to transform from a singular representation to a multifaceted, jumbled composition of the personalities of everyone they pull into the space as they thank them.

Maybe we could acknowledge them in our very titles? Maybe we could be "in(ter)dependent" (from Marcel Goethals) artists, researchers, engineers, technologists, and creatives?

I have an old practice of acknowledging. A couple years ago, I started keeping a record of appreciations for people. There's not really a central repository for them—I just tag them with "#appreciations" in the most accessible note-taking app at that time. Whenever I feel gratitude for someone, I record their name followed by what part of them I'm feeling grateful for. I wrote a little script to extract these, and I've been thinking about sharing them with people on their birthday (or perhaps every season?). There's the seed of something beautiful here. How would you adopt this practice and how else would you share it with the people you love to thank them?

Latest News

• Gather is available for anyone to try on iOS and Android. I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can read more about it and my broader computing philosophy in this wonderful interview Meg and Cab from Are.na conducted with me.

• I'm headed to London and Berlin for a couple weeks in mid-July. I'd love to hear recommendations and if you know of venues where I could host a webstone workshop!

• With Gather released, I'm heads-down working on my installation, AcknowledgeNET, a piece honoring how much of our labor makes up the Internet, for Gray Area's Artist Showcase on July 10 and 11th in San Francisco. If you're free come by to see it and 10+ other works :)

• I'm starting to explore the possibilities of creating a small batch of computing-infused ceramic objects monthly as another way to make rent (more thoughts on this whole tension with money soon.. lol). Let me know if you have ideas.. and I'm also open to custom commissions (either a personal webstone for yourself or a specialized design for your team or even your most loyal customers)

This dispatch was sent to 846 inboxes. My writing is independently funded and made free and possible, in large part, through the support of the community. Consider sharing this with a friend and tipping me if you have the means and want to see this work continue!

Thank you to the 27 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month and especially to Jasmine for their generous sponsorship.

assorted hands from my webstone workshops

A person's hand can tell you so much about them. Perhaps it's only natural because they are our instruments for creation.

Maybe that's why there's something so intimate about designing a computing experience that unfolds in someone's hand. Designing a mobile app and handheld devices should, therefore, be an act of love.

Unfortunately, it doesn't feel that way for many, if not most, of our everyday mobile experiences. Most apps feel like they've been designed to check off requirements and not for people to use. Some even feel like they actively work against what you want, to hold you against your will. Others simply feel like they want your money (or your data to sell for money).

Our devices are trapped in platforms that allow for little experimentation, with companies spending millions lobbying against modifying or repairing devices and open payments.

Between making a mobile app and webstones (and the experiences that these stones should lead you to), handheld computer experiences have been a bit of an obsession recently.

Hosting these workshops has shown me all the different ways we hold our phones and conceptualize how they talk to other things. We each have a personal relationship with our devices, from the unique way we hold them to how we choose the wallpaper and font to the way we arrange our apps.

And in a world where we're always expecting more from our phones, watching people make something for their phones is a strange and humanizing experience. In these workshops, these phones feel like their own individuals. One participant in the webstones workshop created a notch in the stone to cradle their phone’s corner, and L created a pillow for their phone to go to sleep (do not disturb mode).

There's a tenderness to introducing clay in this way, activating our hands as the creative tools they are and in a way that "gives back" to the devices that do so much for us. These creations feel intimate in the way that a handheld computing experience should. They introduce a new possibility, a new branch to unfold in our relationship with our devices.

It feels impossible to imagine this kind of relationship with our devices when our narrative with mobile technology is fraught with tales of exploitation, from endless hours of scrolling to apps that won't let you do the thing you want and need to do1.

But when these mobile experiences go well, there is so much potential for magic. I see it in the sparks of joy and wonder when people tap their phones to my webstone and see the prompt for my website pop up on their screens. I've seen it in the yelps of wonder and the excited chatter when people start imagining their own webstone possibilities at these workshops.

I'm excited for a future of handheld computing that feels like this, shaped by people's hopes, filled with play, and open to possibilities.

I talk about the relationship between our hands and our devices because I'm interested in the texture of computing. And by that I mean, what does it feel like to interact with a computer, with our mobile devices? What emotions are prickled and what kinds of memories arise? How does the digital environment hold your hopes and make space to achieve your desires? Does it feel fun to use? Does it make your body resonate like it does when you see a star shoot across the sky, when you hear the crash of waves standing at the edge of a beach, when you feel the warmth of the day fall to cool night as the last rays of sun set over the horizon?

A handheld digital experience should be as intimate as it feels to hold someone's hand. You must support the phone's full weight with your body, and it must support the full weight of your generous attention. It's not a one-way extraction, but rather an exchange—a kind of barter. In return for your labor, it must deliver something, an experience, a tool, a place—one worthy of your concentrated gaze.

This is the bargain that must be upheld each time we interact with the computers in our hands. This is the contract we must remember in our everyday digital experiences. This is the deal we made.

an alien-like plaster mold of my hand holding a phone

So when does a mobile experience uphold its end of the bargain?

It feels fast. It feels sturdy and trustworthy.

It feels expressive and personal. It feels warm, reassuring, and accepting, like an old friend, the kind you can pick up a conversation with even after several years apart.

It should feel playfully magical. It should feel inviting and full of possibility, like a dance circle that calls you in.

It makes it feel like it's okay to be yourself. It should feel like a collaboration, a communion, like the moment you touch hands with someone you love for the first time—the moment you feel their heartbeat meld with yours.

When have you felt this way with a mobile experience? What else should they feel like? Please share your inspirations with me.

Latest News

• "minute faces": I made a clock that allows you to become with the unique face of every second of the day for Taper 12: check it out or learn more on my website

• I've been hosting workshops for making your own webstone, lately at madsci (thanks zain!) and at stanford (thanks kelsey!! reply if you'd like to join the next one and i'll make sure to send the link to you when it gets organized.

• I released some sneak previews of Gather, the mobile client for collecting & cultivating data collections. It's available now for my sponsors (any tier). Support my indie work if you can 🧡

• I gave a talk at Gray Area about my practice and the Internet: recording here

This dispatch was sent to 770 inboxes. My writing is independently funded and made free and possible, in large part, through the support of the community. Consider sharing this with a friend and tipping me if you have the means and want to see this work continue!

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month and especially to Jasmine for their generous sponsorship.

I’ve reached the dreaded “too long for email” with this post, so please head over to my (secret work-in-progress new!!) website to read this one.

https://spencer.place/posts/one-year-research/

Thank you as always for your care and attention.

This dispatch was sent to 686 inboxes. My writing is always free and made possible, in large part, through the support of the community. I am independently funded so appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and tipping or sponsoring me if you have the means.

Thank you to the 11 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Luis, James, Jacky, Jonah, Rachel, Raymond, Greg, Dan, Crystal, Max, Gleb, and Eric.

What if I made a trinket that held my website so I could carry around a thing that feels like one of the most true expressions of myself?

Simultaneously, I'd been playing with NFC chips2 more lately (get your own pack), and it felt like a perfect combination of mediums to achieve my vision. NFC chips can hold small amounts of data, including links that open when tapped by compatible devices. The idea was to make a ceramic trinket with my logo embossed on the front and somehow get an NFC chip on the inside.

After a few iterations, involving MATH(!!) to calculate clay shrinkages to size the container to the NFC chip and testing whether NFC chips survive sitting through a kiln (spoiler alert they do not), I finally made a version that feels pretty good and works really well! I fired it in two pieces, one acting as the "base" and one as the "lid" to insert the NFC chip after they came out of the kiln, sealed up the hole with epoxy putty, and SIGIL I was complete.

overhead view of the stamp in action

Reflecting on a few months of carrying SIGIL I with me, I'm really enjoying being able to carry around a tangible object that somehow represents me on a deeper level? The physical object feels nice and I enjoy its varied texture from the logo marks, an uneven layer of clay, and chipped glaze. It feels rough and incomplete yet deeply important, like my website. Whenever I get to show it to others (often when they want to learn more about my work, which leads me to ask "can I give you my website?"), there's this look of genuine wonder and delight from the whole experience. I especially love how this feels in more "professional" settings. The playful joy that emerges from the interaction feels like a tiny subversion against all the 3D chess politics that are usually involved in networking situations.

This focus on physical augmentation has a long history in tangible computing from the MIT Media Lab. Their principles focus on direct manipulation and seamless integration between the digital and physical worlds. For example, a core exploration is around "ambient displays" that leverage physical space as an environment for digital material to be felt, such as a "wind of bits" causing pinwheels to spin.

from the slides of Hiroshi Ishii, the head of the Tangible Media Group

It's an interesting time to revisit these principles with the latest buzz in computing around the Vision Pro.

I still haven't gotten the chance to try it out3), but on first instinct, I feel less excited about augmented reality (AR) that involves overlaying software on the physical world for a solo experience, of which the Vision Pro seems to represent the apex achievement. This approach seems to only grow our attachment to the device rather than any of the reality being augmented. It hijacks physical reality and massages it into the optimal form for our digital realities.

Instead, I'm compelled by the kind that involves imbuing software into physical objects that are perceptible by everyone, in the same way physical objects already are. I want to imbue physical objects with computational properties. I want computing that brings people together where they already are, rather than more advanced and convenient ways of immersing into digital realities.

This is partially what makes my stamp feel so magical. It's meaningless without other people and the computational property activates a communal sense of joy and wonder. This shared sense of reality is a core part of the tangible computing explorations.

Compared to augmented reality, tangible computing is:

• an inherently shared experience because it involves enchanting physical objects that everyone can see rather than individual technological overlays

• adds functionality inherently tailored to a specific object's physical properties

I'm very excited about all the developments that continue to come out in this field from folks like folk and the innovations painting circuits. I imagine a day in the future when we can simply draw our computers and manipulate them from both our devices and the objects we already have in our lives.

On my end, I'm excited to continue exploring this idea by creating NFC-enhanced objects. The next step in my explorations is to lean more into the "manipulable" property of the tangible computing principles. NFC doesn't allow for a ton of expressiveness. The communication is one-way. But what if we could communicate two-way, and visitors could shape not only the digital space the object holds but also the very object itself? One novel emphasis in my explorations, compared to prior work, is an emphasis on no or minimal battery power required.

The requirement of a constant power supply limits where these devices can be placed. But I want tangible computing devices that can be as commonplace and ubiquitous as the flyers that plaster telephone poles across cities.

I think embedding these tangible computing devices in public can help facilitate and strengthen local communities.

We already feel a latent connection to those in our communities even if we don't know them: the other regulars at our favorite cafe, those who love the same park bench that we always visit on our walks, our neighbors who we pass on the street day after day. That bond activates with a surprising strength when we learn something intimate about them. I think about how I feel seeing other people's works at the pottery studio, the fortunes people write at Buddhist temples, or the little messages people leave in the sidewalk.

a warm message on a San Francisco sidewalk

I think these public computing devices can become a kind of infrastructure to facilitate this. In the same way that we already share with our community through memorials, neighborhood libraries, and community fridges, I wonder what computing as a material can offer us if we could embed them in public areas as easily. Can we move beyond merely facilitating connection to building solidarity?

I want to make computing shrines4: communally created and maintained sites of intimacy and solidarity facilitated by the fabric of computing.

I want computers that I can touch and make me feel touched, by all the lives that I'm surrounded by.

recent updates & asks

• playhtml react launch: I made a big update to playhtml to add react support. It feels oddly good to use to make small communal web experiences, like having a "choose-the-color" website and a cursor party. These two are part of my weekly(ish) experiments with playhtml that take less than an hour to make. Play around and I encourage you to make something simple with playhtml if you've been interested! If you run into any trouble, I'd love to help you out—just DM me.

• I debuted my latest piece of internet art at an event in New York a couple of weeks ago. You can experience some of it live on the web:

  https://cursorwatch.ing/

This dispatch was sent to 639 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded so appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and sponsoring me if you have the means.

Thank you to the 11 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Luis, James, Jacky, Jonah, Rachel, Raymond, Greg, Dan, Crystal, Max, Gleb, and Eric.

I'm sitting under the warm glow of circular paper lamps that fill the ceiling. I'm at a local bakery with a vast open seating area. Because I work from home 90% of the time now, I forget how much I enjoy working with the clamor of people living (talking, eating, bustling) around me. Somehow, the noise fuels my focus, while silence can feel like too much pressure. I like the camouflage that working amidst a big crowd offers. I feel safe when I'm surrounded by the clatter of living.

I've been thinking about gifting. I have an unfinished gift guide for 2023 I started during the holiday season that I suppose is too late to send out now (but will maybe make a good spring surprise?). Likely, it was inspired by me making more gifts lately. Ceramics, as a craft, makes for a convenient medium for gift-making. You can imagine something and form a rough prototype of it relatively easily. S and I made a bunch of fortune cookies out of ceramic, and I've been giving some of them away with handwritten fortunes stuffed inside.

the array of glazes and fortunes

Each cookie has a different glaze and I chose their recipient to match. Combine that with the fact that each fortune is customized, and the gifts feel like 1/1 creations, made for their recipient.

Laurel writes that she "only makes odes," celebrations of the worth of another person or influence. I like this framing because it provides a powerful perspective of "who am I honoring?" which makes a powerful contrast to the growth-minded perspectives that have started to take over discussions of what you should focus your time on. Rather than a chart going up and to the right being the marker of success, making odes is done well when it helps people feel a new-found appreciation for your target subject.

Every couple months, discourse comes up on what you should prioritize when you work on a side project. The pendulum usually swings along a spectrum of fun-maxxing vs. utility-maxxing (clout, revenue, etc.). But another option exists. You can make something to bring it into existence for someone else. Rilke says that the best art comes out of necessity. Making something for the purpose of someone else may not be necessity exactly, but it's something close to it. When you make something for someone that they deeply appreciate, the exchange captures a similar kind of urgent resonance

Personal gifts are much like single-purpose websites and tools. They are designed for a single purpose, too—to make a specific someone feel appreciated. They have the flexibility to be uniquely beautiful because they are catering to the tastes of a single person. There is no conflict of interest. You can match their taste as closely as your ability allows you to.

When you make something for one person, you can narrow in on emotional resonance. Novels and movies convey a universal message by telling a compelling personal story. "The personal is the universal" as Carl Rogers' famous saying goes. To be general, we must be specific. To reach the universe, we must touch one person deeply.

Many general-purpose tools and projects have emerged from gifts. I'm reminded of how this expanding text library emerged from Jacky making a website as an anniversary gift for his partner and how this musicBottles project from the MIT Media Lab emerged from creating a gift to a mother. Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, an influential book for artists for many years, is a series of letters between Rilke and a student seeking his advice. Even when the specific someone you are honoring is yourself, it can translate into something that connects others. The Making of Prince of Persia is a cleaned-up collection of Jordan Mechner's mostly raw journal entries from the period he worked on the video game.

All of us are so unique in undeniable ways, yet we're also not as different as we think. Perhaps working to honor someone or something can bring us closer to the universal answers humankind has always sought.

A few months ago, I found a dead bird in my apartment's shared backyard. The night before a bird had flown into my room through an open window and got stuck inside for a while. An image of it perched atop our curtain rod lingers in my mind. I think I must have taken this as a sign that I had a duty to this passed bird. Even as my mind raced with questions like "won't it look weird for me to be carrying around a dead animal?" and "what will people think of me digging a hole in a public park?", My body seemed to move on its own to honor this bird.

I put on some gloves, wrapped its body in a plastic bag, and took it to a favorite park nearby. I found a clearing in front of a bush of purple flowers to give it a proper burial. After covering the hole and gingerly laying its body inside. I assembled an altar out of found tributes from the park: flowers, a fallen strawberry fruit, and a broken fragment of green stone.

left to right, bird stuck in room photo taken by S and the initial altar

This all happened several months ago, but I still pass by the spot regularly to check up on the shrine. The tributes are mostly gone each time, and I try to replace them with something each time to mark my coming. In an act of folk programming and platform reappropriation, I added the location of the shrine to Google Maps, so that others might contribute offerings when they pass by.

I find myself paying more attention to birds since this act. I notice them in the crevices of trees and atop distant phone lines, where I wouldn't have seen them before. My head swerves to scan the surroundings when I hear a call that I don't recognize. I look at community-made shrines and notice the traces of offerings through the weeks.

This act of dedication has changed me in ways I didn't imagine, and I'm sure it'll continue to do so.

What dedications have you made? Do you know of other stories where a broader project emerged from a gift or dedication?

Thank you for everyone who is reading this and to the 587 inboxes subscribed. To support my independent work, please share my work with someone you think would enjoy it.

Thank you to the 11 people who support me with a monthly sponsorship: Luis, James, Jacky, Jonah, Rachel, Raymond, Dan, Crystal, Max, Gleb, and Eric.

From generating ASCII art to finding Wikipedia articles about places near your location, to changing the faces of images to look at your cursor, the web is full of wondrous gadgets (peruse my full catalog). I keep these tabs pinned in a browser window and think of them as my internet toolshed. I head to the river when I’m in a visual mood. I scroll through https://transparenttextures.com/ when I’m in need of an interesting feel. I go to careful words to play with language when it’s not coming out the right way, and I go to my local clipboard converter whenever I need to paste some content into Obsidian to get it formatted correctly. I even have a place I visit to create ᵗᶦⁿʸ ᵗᵉˣᵗ (you’d be surprised how often one needs tiny text!).

I like how distinct these tools feel, each with their own stories, personalities, and creators. They feel a lot like my homecooked apps except they’ve been made and made available by someone else for me to use. This means I don't have the agency to change them (except for open-source ones), but they still feel personal and are often designed well enough for the specific use I have in mind. I’ve grown fond of them over the months as we make memories in the timeless sea that is the web. My hands are accustomed to their interfaces—I skip over the introduction text as soon as I arrive and the clang and clack of industry begins.

As much as I like the idea of a single general-purpose tool for creating any software that you want (I passionately worked at Coda, after all), I don’t think we can make something entirely new that lasts forever. More and more, we want to build something that is the solution1 to everything, the tool to end all tools, rather than making something useful in one specific way.

While I applaud the effort, I find myself drawn to the simple beauty of single-purpose tools more and more lately. They don’t claim to be anything they are not. They do the one thing well, and that’s all they have to do.

Being optimized for a specific task, single-purpose tools necessarily have constraints. As a result, they tend to look and function pretty uniquely, which often makes them hard to miss. Some are made fun of for how niche their purpose is (like the avocado slicer) and others are celebrated for their dedication to a single craft (like the ultimate Bonsai scissors).

the OXO Avocado Slicer and a tamagoyaki egg pan

And although they’re only advertised as having a single purpose, sometimes their constraints actually provide a fertile environment to find new creative uses, like using a vanity mirror to look at flowers. Purists may be shocked at the idea of using something so meticulously crafted as Bonsai scissors to snip green onions, but I like that we challenge the purported single-nature of these tools. We don’t make it easy for them.

On the web, there’s something charming about the “smallness” of these tools, in contrast to the big polished monoliths that claim to do everything. I often trust a site that is a little unresponsive, but obviously made by a person much more than a polished site with a landing page that looks like Stripe’s (or whatever the latest trending aesthetic will be). When the site feels like its made by a person, it feels different from what we’re accustomed to seeing on the web nowadays. These sites are not SEO-optimized. They feature plain, sometimes grammatically incorrect and sometimes dry and lengthy, language. They may not be mobile-responsive and may even occasionally be down when you try to visit them.

They aren’t trying to convince you to use the tool because they likely made the tool for themselves, first and foremost. And if they do, it's purely because they want more people to be able to use it, rather than getting signups for their product2.

(from left to right) Josh Comeau’s gradient generator, the practice guide maker, and the italic text generator,

These kinds of tools mesh well with the rising culture of getting creative value out of the things you already have. We glamorize the creative resilience of creating a feast out of kitchen scraps and leftovers to sustain ourselves (girl dinner). And, we love finding new life hacks to avoid buying more things. Another part I love about these tools is that their creator took the time to turn the code they likely originally wrote themselves into a website that makes the tool available for others to benefit from. They are connecting their creation to the broader internet, and as a result, giving me another tool to put in my toolshed3.

Sure, more people now make these tools to capture a popular search query with fancy domains, SEO-optimized pages, and a web of upsells and ads waiting in the wings. But for every one of those, I believe we’ll still find people like you and me who make small tools because they need them and share them because they think it’ll help at least one other person on this wide, wide internet.

When you try to make something that solves everything, you obsess over questions of power: how to make something that is all-powerful and everlasting. But when you make a small tool that solves one thing, you only need to answer a very personal one: does it solve my problem? Rather than the question of how to make software that lasts forever, I think more about how long and who for and where will it push the space to develop. I want to see more visionary efforts that embrace the pluralistic nature of the internet, that allow you to bring many little tools together in one place, while preserving their unique characteristics.

Making some small tools for the web isn't a bad place to start.

What are some of your favorite small tools and libraries you’ve come across on the web? When do you wish you could combine them together? Do you already cobble some of them together regularly?

in related news, Tiff Ng wrote a lovely piece about the whimsy of the internet for MIT Technology Review, featuring html garden! Speaking of, the garden’s exhibition at the DeYoung ended this past weekend, and I got a new shiny domain for it (htmls.garden, sadly html.garden was taken).

And here’s a sneak peek of that app I’ve been working on (my first mobile app ever!). If you’re interested in curating multi-media albums on-the-go from your phone and/or use are.na liberally, just reply and let me know (iPhone only for now).

Thank you for everyone who is reading this, and welcome to all the new folks (now 581 of you!!). If you’d like to support my independent work, I’d appreciate if you shared anything I’ve made that resonates with someone who you think would enjoy it (and I also have a sponsors page for people to support my independent work and get inside scoops)!

There’s been a rising trend in the software world to imagine that the future of software is video games. For example, Not Boring Software is a company that recreates the standard phone apps from a game-first perspective: 3D designs, meticulous attention to interaction detail, and paired soundtracks. New real-time syncing libraries like Partykit (and my inspired creation playhtml) are making it incredibly easy to make websites multiplayer, which many games incorporate as the default. This prediction is wise in a lot of ways in terms of interaction, narrative, tutorial, and multiplayer design, and more and more people desire a liveness and tactility in websites that we take for granted in video games.

However, today I want to turn the prediction on its head to make another hypothesis:

Websites are the future of video games.

They are the “end game” of video games. They are spaces where the end players (the website visitors) have the agency to freely interact with others, and not towards any predetermined object, but purely for themselves, discovering who they are in each new environment and finding new ways of relating to one another.

The past few weeks I’ve watched several of Tim Rogers’ video game reviews on his channel Action Button.

To dismiss these reviews as merely “video game reviews” would betray the amount of depth, range, and relevance of these cultural artifacts. These “critiques,” as I’ll refer to them, each focus on a single video game deemed to be “seminal” in some way to the history of video games and run for no less than 5 hours (with the longest coming in at 8+ hours in total). Rogers starts his analysis before the video game, dissecting the existing video game landscape, the studio and designers that created it, and the broader social context, to chart a trail through what kind of impact it has and what it demonstrates as an object of media.

two games that Action Button has reviewed (top) screenshot from Doom and (bottom) screenshot from Boku No Natsuyasumi

In his review of Doom, the famous 1993 demon-slaying game attributed with inventing the “first-person shooter” genre and is famous for being ported to ridiculous modern devices like smart fridges, graphing calculators, and even an ATM, Rogers recalls a single wistful line from an obscure game magazine review of Doom around when it first came out: “if only we could have talked to those creatures.” This line is what Rogers chases throughout the rest of his “season” of reviews. One of his favorites is a review of Tokimeki Memorial, a Japanese game from 1994 that popularized the “dating-sim.” The game allows you to relive high school as a teenage boy who encounters several girls that he has the option to get to know. Each character has their own personality, and you’re given several dialogue choices that affect their impression of you. Rather than creatures that are the same every time you see them, Tokimeki Memorial gives the impression where your agency comes into conflict with several others’, each with their own desires and personalities. At the end of this season, he concludes that more video games should ditch combat mechanics and instead focus on how your choice of actions question and ultimately shape who you are and what you care about.

As I watch Tim talk about all this, I think about how websites feel like multiplayer video games, all of which are part of the broader “internet” universe. One in which the “creatures” are the cursors of other, real people. And where we can’t fight each other at all, only talk to one another.

from https://twitter.com/spencerc99/status/1675545840319070210

Somewhere in the push to make the internet the infrastructure of a global capitalist economy, we lost this perspective on what the internet is. If I asked people to define what websites are to them, they might talk about the capabilities they provide: “the world’s information at your fingertips,” “AI that does whatever you ask of it,” “a platform for selling products.” Or as design artifacts: they provide the basis of interactive, creative pieces of art, media, and writing.

But if we distill a website down to its base components, it is a space that allows people to talk to each other. In the era when the internet was new and before we had predetermined what it was “for,” everyday internet pioneers found ways to talk to one another by making websites for each other. The conversations spanned webs of personal websites, revealing intimate detail in exchange for intimate detail. They bartered histories for kinship, stories for solidarity, identities for community.

The websites of our modern-day internet experience reflect quite a different perspective on what websites should be “for.” Websites are often the expression of a corporate unit, optimized for flow, retention, or the latest trendy design aesthetic. We focus on animation design and gradient layering rather than the interactions that govern how we relate to one another.

a living memorial for Alex Nieto, a local killed by SFPD in 2014 with rocks and flowers from neighbors

To embrace “websites are the future of video games,” we must turn our focus over to how we can evolve the modern aesthetic of websites. How do we make websites feel more like embodied objects? What does a website that can become well-worn or passed down feel like? How does a website become a living gathering space, one that evolves with the activity of its participants? How can a website enable showing care to each other? How can it facilitate solidarity between people?

Rather than solely looking towards video games for inspiration here, we should draw from the decades of activity, community-making, and self-documentation that have been conducted on the internet and question how we can enable new ways for people to relate to one another, drawing on the decades of multiplayer environment design that video games have pioneered.

With lightness, Spencer

some lingering extra thoughts…

I originally discovered this channel through his most recent video, a review of a Japanese game called “Boku No Natsuyasumi” (ぼくのなつやすみ), “My Summer Vacation” in English. The game is about a Japanese boy from the big city who goes to their family’s countryside home for their summer vacation. You play as the boy, Boku (yes the main character’s name also means “I” in Japanese), and decide what he does for each day of his vacation, slowly uncovering the hidden wonders of the countryside and the family’s untold history. No particular “objective” is given, and the player is given free agency to spend the vacation in the way that most appeals to them. In the end, the player’s actions lead to several possible scenarios of the player’s future 25 years later.

You should go watch the whole review (although I’d watch it sped up and split it up into multiple parts like a mini docu-series), but I’ll recount the particularly relevant moments here. The game calls you out for achieving a perfect “score” in the game. If you try to do everything, optimize for completing every part of the game (which requires that you have tried and failed before in order to use knowledge gained from the failure for the perfect run on a redo), you are called a liar by the game. The “best” scenario happens if you only achieve 60-70% of the game. In essence, it rewards you for being true to yourself.

The game critiques “completionist” mindsets that modern video games encourage. People want to achieve 100% and will optimize their way into the best build you can create. In big video games, expansions have to be continually created that create ever-increasing power creeps in order to keep things interesting. If you can race in the game, then the race will be one to the bottom. To escape this prophecy of expectation, we have to be encouraged to find new ways of measuring time and progress.

As video games have shifted towards hyper-optimization, the internet has gone a similar direction. Friction has been systematically eliminated and sophisticated automated experimentation infrastructure enables optimization of key metrics at a microscopic level of detail. In return, we’ve come to view websites and the broader internet more and more as a purely utilitarian medium. Even social media, which at some point was positioned as something for self-expression and community-making has become almost entirely a space for influence climbing.

What websites and apps reward us for doing 60% of all the things that they offer? We need more websites that gently guide us to trust our own choices and intuitions, that chide us when we try to do it all and work ourselves to the bone, that nudge us to find beauty in unexpected places, to find the poetry in the lazy.

Thank you for everyone who is reading this, and welcome to all the new folks (now 530 of you!!). If you’d like to support my independent work, I’d appreciate if you shared anything I’ve made that resonates with someone who you think would enjoy it (and I also have a sponsors page for people to support my independent work and get inside scoops)!

I want to make the web feel alive.

So often on the web, we feel alone—just our cursor in the big world wide web. Even though it's already teeming with life with all the things we do on it, so much of what we do is hidden from each other. And that's the hope the internet gave to when people first discovered it: the people everywhere in AIM chats and on random forums and obscure wikis and in the corners of places you would never expect to have people.

The web shows us that there are others out there, like us, regardless of how niche our interests are, and their words and creations touch us. If only we could say more back to them... To share all of those rich interactions with each other, we have to expose ourselves in an entire identity and profile. We don't have the safety to express ourselves naturally in this binary space. We must choose either solitude or the spotlight, and all the consequences that come with it.

I want to make the web feel alive naturally, in a way where we feel safe to just express ourselves as richly as we already do—in the cursor patterns we form, the frenzy of navigations while on a rabbit hole, and how long we hover over each comment that makes our sides hurt with laughter.

Around two months ago, I mentioned in this newsletter a new prototype I was going to be trying out something to make the web feel more alive that embraced html energy:

Specifically, how can digital spaces more naturally imbue presence, in the same way that you can't help leaving a mark in the physical world (unless you do the work to remove it), whether it's your footprint in the dirt, your empty bowl by the sink, or the impression in the pillow. The idea we were exploring was a library you could add via a script import that brings HTML elements to life with this presence using special attributes.

from https://twitter.com/spencerc99/status/1689359111203467271

If you missed it, I made this and launched it last month! It's an open-source library called playhtml that makes the web come alive, filled with the traces of visitors, and you can play with it at playhtml.fun. Leave a trace for me and others to find, and I'd love to see you try it out on your own sites!

These small physical indicators may seem inconsequential, but they are not only signs of life but they are conduits of life itself. These little indicators of people (and rather than the general, abstract sense, I mean real, specific people!) offer themselves to us as sites of connection, and they challenge us to divine who they belong to.

What I'm targeting here is a tangible sense of presence that you don't feel on websites right now—the felt sense that someone has been here and the possibility of knowing who that someone is. This rich set of interconnected interactions and presence comes for free in the physical world, where everything has a tangible presence. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be shifted around. In the physical world, objects have a body that cannot simply be disappeared (at least not easily). Everything you do leaves some trace and causes chain reactions in response. Our actions automatically create reactions, and as a result, we have a living, breathing, and unpredictable ecosystem that offers so much rich detail for us to pay attention to.

In a digital space, the closest we get is in the ocean currents of large-scale social media. There's an organic life force here that's driven by people in the cultural trend, in the constant ebb and flow of niche reference material in whatever has become cultural canon and lore. You can pick up on a surprising amount of detail in the way people interact and the content they make in how much is referencing (and influenced by) what has been happening the past day, week, month, and even years (references to Vines, a long-dead product, still resurface now and again). However, this life force is ultimately directed by the Algorithm. The "breath of the gods" (as Robin Sloan calls it) bestows cultural relevance on those it deems to fulfill their desires (of longer view times, higher engagement, etc.). We only have so much control over how the ecosystem works.

Instead, I'd like to paint a different future, one which preserves the overflowing amount of life and countless number of interdependent interactions, but gives the power of shaping the environment ultimately to the participants in it. I'd call my approach something akin to the advocacy around learning from indigenous practices of living with the earth, rather than trying to control it through large machinery and interventions as we have done in our physical environments. In a digital world, we are the nature. We were here before the Algorithm, and we were here before the huge platforms that purport to give us freedom. Just as we must listen to the plants, animals, and the earth in our local ecosystems in order to learn how to live in harmony with them, the Algorithm should be shaping itself according to our needs and desires, rather than trying to sweep us into the behaviors that they desire.

In creating playhtml, I am trying to imagine a world where rich expression and shared reality are a natural and given part of our daily experience on the internet. In the same way that we have seen so many fun and unique forms of expression emerge in the shared spaces of Google Docs (cursor parking lot) and Figma (cursor high fives), I want to create the infrastructure such that this kind of organic invention of new ways to relate to each other and express ourselves is ingrained into the very fiber of using the web. We already invent new ways of relating to each other all the time while we use the internet—we folk program our software into the kinds of spaces that we want to share together, but I want this to feel like an official and default way of using the internet, in which you are empowered to create the worlds that you want to inhabit.

There's a massive challenge inherent to this direction, which is that it is completely different from people's intuitive perceptions about how the web and websites work. This is something that many of the real-time collaboration tools have had to deal with (this conflict in perception came up so much in Coda discussions as well), especially when there are some things that are individual and others that are real-time collaborative. How are you supposed to know which is which? I've experienced how wildly different people react to the project depending on how I show them the demo: 1) just showing them on my phone because I'm on the go and 2) having them go to the website and showing them from my browser because they can actually follow my cursor and see everything that I'm doing happen in real-time. The latter is stunning (in a non-normative way) because "normal" websites aren't supposed to work this way. And yet, I think it's worth seeing how far we can go with challenging this notion.

" Resonance, by contrast [with recognition] is always a dynamic event, the expression of a vibrant responsive relationship that can be seen perhaps most splendidly when a person's eyes light up. . . . [It] always refers to an occurrence between two or more subjects. I am recognized, but resonance is something that can only happen between us. Love as a resonant experience thus refers not to the fact of loving or being loved, but to the moment or moments of mutual, transformative, fluid, affecting encounter."
— Harmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, paraphrased by Jenny Odell

Aliving the web is about enabling resonance, hand-holding, and the ability for our souls to be touched by others. I want the internet to be the connective tissue it originally promised to be, everywhere and in more creative and original ways that are true to the inventiveness of our spirits instead of plain text and rich media.

Next up on my mind for playhtml is making it more compatible (like using Javascript frameworks) and allowing the plug-and-play of wholesale components (like the candle or lamps on the website). The big, existential question I'm weighing is how this is different from just a better state management library (that handles the spectrum of real-time persisted, real-time synced not persisted, local persisted), of which there already exists some really nice reactive approaches that already collaborative cases via Yjs (like Syncedstore)? My intention was to provide a more opinionated and out-of-the-box useful library, which includes some common capabilities that you would already want, but it's really hard to make these general and customizable without being too opinionated. I wanted this to be a communal library for capabilities and avenues for aliveness that we all could curate together, but given that there have been no contributions other than mine, I wonder how easy it really is to not only come up with a capability but generalize it for everyone to use on their own websites.

Both of these are for selfish reasons because I want both of those capabilities for projects I want to make with playhtml (which funnily enough I think goes a long way to making the library better?). You can see playhtml in action on the demos & chill site (where I first presented this project), the recent conversation about dream digital spaces I had with Jacky, and of course, on my website. Soon (hopefully), a graveyard for a beloved site and a communal garden.

I’ve been thinking about all the home-cooked apps I’ve made for myself over the years, prompted by this call for them for a conference talk. Through a combination of my interest in end-user programming and passion for the poetic web, I find that I’ve accumulated a large collection of tiny apps and websites, built out of very specific personal desires that have emerged. I had forgotten how many of these I had made given how long it’s been since some of them were created.

A pattern I notice is that most of them are designed to archive some continuous ritual or practice. They all rely on varying custom solutions for storing and representing data. I want there to be a better way to make, curate, and maintain small collections of data. There have been many calls for this kind of thing, but little progress in the way of a new transformative solution despite how many bookmarking apps there are (and how many continue to pop up every now and then).

i love living note

This originated from me repeatedly being intimate with this feeling of overwhelming gratitude for being alive and wanting to create a time capsule to preserve these feelings. It started off as just recording the date and time and leaving me space to write a little note about it, and increasingly I added more and more metadata to capture as much of the surrounding context as possible to “bottle” up this feeling. I added the location, front and back camera photos (BeReal style), and I really wanted a way to capture the surrounding snippet of audio (in the same way Live Photos do) but that wasn’t technically feasible.

I turned it into an iOS shortcut so I could run it from my home screen and also just tell Siri to run it by saying “i love living” so it was as easy as possible for me to capture without detracting from the moment.

Let me know if you want to use this and I can share the shortcut?

wall of windows

I made a wall of windows to create the space for collecting vignettes of my life and showing the latest ones on a website. I found that having an explicit “collection” for different kinds of things prompted me to add more to them. This rings true for when I started using are.na for the first time. After a little over a year using it, I’ve collected so many things that I can refer back to (even if the search is not the best..). The in-moment act of saying ”this is interesting, and it falls under this broad umbrella of things I’ve been thinking about” creates a little wedge in my brain that makes me remember I found that thing all those months ago. All I need is the wedge to be able to rummage through all my digital drawers, paths, and traces to find what I was looking for.

The site for displaying the windows was also an experiment in an ephemeral kind of social network. It rewarded people for revisiting the site because you couldn’t access the full archive of images, only the latest ones. I wanted to see what it would feel like for a site to live, breathe, and change as I did in real-time.

I ended up extending this wall to be open to the public (guests) to submit their own life vignettes, and I ended up hosting snapshots of life from all over, from sunsets in bangkok to old game consoles, to airy treehouses. I made a tiny little social network that worked to share some intimate photos for a little bit.

bulletin

Bulletin started off as a thought around how we could create subversive tools that enable us to better control our attention online. It evolved into an “anti todo-list,” a “softer Anki,” and an embedded feed inside social media feeds that served meaningful things that I want to remember (poems, pictures, and quotes).

It’s on the backburner right now because I found that the current form is lacking something that makes it feel really good to use. I find that I get used to it and start scrolling immediately past it… Maybe it was because I was being exposed to too much old stuff because my bank of things to remember wasn’t that big? I also find that there was an inherent tension with the attention required of the things that I want to remember (usually dense and attention-intensive) and the kind of attention I wanted to spend when I was going to social media sites. This might work better if I focused on only image-focused / audio-focused media or pulled from a much larger repository of data (including things from friends that I might care about, maybe are.na channels that have a bunch of content that I don’t want to consume immediately?)

fits stream

This project was an experiment in personal data archival for a practice I started of taking a picture of my outfit every day. I initially started doing this in a Twitter thread, but I didn’t like how that spammed my existing timeline. Ultimately, I wanted a place I could store the data that could easily extend into new interfaces for showing the data and a mostly automated method that built off of my existing practice (of uploading it to an iCloud album). So I embarked on a quest to make my own data archival repository (named reservoir). This relies on a script that I run on my computer to extract photos (and corresponding metadata) from my “fits 🧢” album, uploads the photos to an S3 bucket, dumps the metadata into a fits.json file hosted on my website, and I render all the fits at fits. In the end, I effectively have my own data pipeline and warehouse just for my fits! Ideally, I wouldn’t even have to run the script, but unfortunately, programmatic access to Apple Photos is terrible.

personal status api

I’m reflecting that a bunch of these tiny apps were made in order to enable some “live” widget on my website. My status API is an API that returns some of my latest activities, captured from different data sources. This ends up powering the marquee on my personal website, showing my latest activity.

I really like the idea of collecting all your digital activity traces so you can do fun things like look back on where you were running a year ago or that you visited the link you’re on now X months ago.

For a long time, I wanted to make an app that was a personal digital panopticon so you could look back on exactly what traces you left doing things on your computer a year ago (e.g. this Github commit, liked this Tweet, lingered on the comment on this Youtube video). Even though Rewind has shown the technological innovation needed to make this technically feasible, in practice, I found it way too noisy. I want my personal panopticon to only record the things that I express some sort of revealed preference for (I liked it, I saved it, I highlighted some words on it and copied it, I started typing a reply but didn’t send it, etc.). There are so many actions we do on our computers that show them what we are thinking about and find intriguing, and there’s so much more they could do with that information in deciding which bytes are important.

website screenshot archive

I made this net-shots repo to archive a bunch of pictures of my website. It uses the shot-scraper template created by Simon Willison. The impetus for this shares a lot with the previous one. I wanted to create something that could create a daily archive to record the legacy of the website and how it evolves over time, like a selfie-a-day tool for your digital spaces. I tinker a lot with my personal website (and the window site also updates often), so this is an add-on tool for a lot of these “living” websites that can document that change over time.

Up until now, I gave up on making it properly archive everything as opposed to just having the latest picture in the Github repo but finally for this post made it so that it uploads a copy to S3 every time it takes a snapshot. I guess ideally it would recognize if it was duplicate by doing a diff pass over the existing image (so if anyone would like that pls make a PR so I can take advantage too). Excited to see how this archive develops a year from now.

expense tracker

I may have the most elaborate personal finance app that is only built for one person. Effectively I’ve made my own YNAB / Mint in order to keep on top of my finances. I have a script I run every month that leverages access codes to banks accessed via Plaid to upload transactions as rows into a Coda table. I’m able to triage all my transactions through this interface, categorize them, and chart data against different time scales to evaluate how my spending and earning are evolving over time (especially helpful in this funemployment stage of life). I can create custom tags for different events (like trips or furnishing my house, etc.) so I can keep track of how spending is evolving over time for those things that span many different categories. And I can map out reimbursements so I make sure I didn’t forget to split large charges.

A lot of people have asked me if they can use this tool. The problem is that it uses so many custom-built quirky systems that I now have a trained mental muscle for operating which would be very confusing under traditional interface standards. For example, for some reason, I decided that positive numbers would be expenses and negative numbers would be income early on. I also delete credit card payment charges (and the respective bank transfer transaction) because they don’t provide any new or extra information. And because I also include Venmo as an import source, I delete any transactions titled “Venmo” from my bank because they would double count the transaction when it pulls directly from the account to pay. There are all these weird practices I do that are now normalized because I don’t need to fix these things in order for it to work for me.

misc smaller things

• clipboard saver: automatically archiving the things I copy on my computer into a .csv file via an app called Maccy, another form of archival of the everyday actions we do in digital space.

• text assistant / poetry bot: a collective poetry bot that posted to poetry.bsky.social whenever someone texted me (each person could specify their signifying stamp as a pseudonymous form of authorship)

• poem called love: an interactive version of alex dimitrov’s perpetual poem “a poem called love”

What homecooked apps have you made? What have they taught you? What do you find yourself yearning for in your software and digital spaces that you can't have now?

I don't think I'll stop making apps for myself and my friends anytime soon. playhtml is the beginnings of something that bridges making a tool for everyone to build something with this kind of personalized, handmade web. I want people to make a bunch of homecooked websites and fun interactions for themselves and their friends using it. Let me know if you have any dreams in mind?