Manifesto
When I was nine years old, I made a website on Expages (or something similar, I can’t remember exactly) for myself and my two classmates as a place to share news and information from our 5th grade classroom. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t really take, but I remember being so galvanized by the freedom afforded to me to just make a webpage that anyone I knew could go and check out. It was something that I wanted my friends to collaborate with me on and share, but their interest was lukewarm and I soon gave up on it.
Over twenty years later, and I realize that I haven’t changed much in that regard. I want to share things, both with friends and with strangers, that I’m passionate about. Ideas that I think are cool that exist to bring some accessible form of excitement and creativity into daily life. I’ve never stopped wanting to do this, as it turns out.
Now, for a short rant. The digital world we know today sucks, full stop. It just does. Nobody likes social media, and yet they feel tethered to it. Everyone complains about how inauthentic and shallow it often portrays our lives as, and yet we indulge in it out of cognitive dissonance. It’s a lame, bullshit masquerade, but we’re made to feel like it’s the only party in town. Meanwhile, it has become harder and harder to actually be vulnerable and risk something of yourself, even with your friends. It’s never been easier to simply not try something new and different with your peers! I hate this, all of it. It leaves me feeling utterly trapped between echo chambers, advertising, and a gradually hotter earth. It leaves me feeling absolutely alone.
I want to feel like I can share things that interest me, that excite me, and not worry that, next to what everyone else is doing in preordained digital spaces, looks weird, and therefore makes me look weird. More than that, I want people to maybe see it and engage with it, not for revenue or influence, but because they like it and want to have something to do with it. I want that silly little page again like I did when I was eight years old, and I want people to contribute to it and help make it something better than I could have done alone.
So that’s the force behind this endeavor. I want things I come up with to live somewhere that others can see and engage with, rather than die in my phone’s internal storage. I want to experiment and tell stories that encourage others to do the same. I want to feel safe to be myself in some sense, in a way that I’ve never really felt like I could.