into the wreck

Erin Kissane has started a new research studio with the most punk URL I’ve ever seen: wrecka.ge. Get out of here! That’s fantastic. But also everything about this project is, as Erin writes:

We need new networks that genuinely work better, not only for indie-web people or tech people or other outliers, but for all of us working toward collective survival. And I don't think we'll get them by just trying harder—or by swapping in new infrastructure toward the same old ends, or by building reflexively against the cartoon versions of old networks, and definitely not by trying to scold people into make more ethical social networking choices.

For years, across jobs and gigs and fields, I've been making the case that we can't build better things unless we figure out what has been happening to us—what's gone wrong or right, and how, and according to whom, and on what evidence—and then use the things we learn to try new things, carefully and attentively, until we get to something genuinely useful and good.

Erin has done a brilliant job in recent years of explaining how networks and communities online often have terrifying real life consequences for people and so this whole project feels like, in part, a response to the implosion of the One True Network That Shall Not Be Named, where everyone scattered to the four winds once it died. Before then, briefly, there were glimmers of hope that a social network might be a force for good.

So that wreckage is worth exploring not just to bemoan the state of things but to actively make them better. And that, to me, simply rules:

The site, and the tiny studio it represents, are named after the debris of a disaster because I don't think we can get far without acknowledging the wreckage piled up around us, on our networks and far beyond them. It's also named after the process of turning that rubble into something we can think with and work with, because I imagine that's the mode I'll be working in for the rest of my life.

I just subscribed so fast I almost broke my finger! Go support Erin’s work! That’s an order!