The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
Max Stirner
The erosion of digital privacy has been a decades long process, and it feels like it will only get worse from here.
If you’re one of the people who say things like “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear” any time privacy is brought up, I’d like to respond with “if you have nothing to say then shut the fuck up”. Under international law, human beings have a right to privacy just like we have a right to free speech, and I don’t have to justify the exercise of my rights to anyone.
Why?
Let’s not dwell only on the abstract philosophy of rights and laws. Instead, let’s think about the practical need for digital privacy. Specifically, the need for the primary tool of achieving digital privacy: encryption.
Do you know what the internet is? It’s a series of tubesinterconnected networks (thus the name) of computers talking to each other out in the open. Pretty much anyone can connect to the internet, meaning that pretty much anyone can listen in on that digital chatter. So what happens when (notif, when) there’s an eavesdropper on one of those tubes networks? Well, probably nothing. Not nothing nothing, but… look, just work with me for this little thought experiment alright?
In the year of our lord (J.R. “Bob” Dobbs) 1998±n 2025 CEADWhatever, almost all data going over public networks like the internet is encrypted. And eavesdropping attackers can’t decrypt the data without already having the key (unlikely), having a quantum computer (even more unlikely), or having more time than the universe will probably exist (the implications of such a being needing your credit card number are terrifying); now if an attacker controls where the encrypted data ends up, that’s a different story, but let’s not focus on that.
But if you still don’t care, why don’t you go ahead and send me your credit card number.
“Okay!” you relent. “Encryption is important for stuff like that, but why can’t we have encryption that only works for the good guys doing legitimate things and not for the bad guys doing crime?” you ask.
First, who are you to say who is good and who is bad? Sure, someone selling stolen social security numbers on some hidden forum is most definitely a bad guy. But what about a journalist reporting on how an oppressive regime is violating human rights? To you, they’re a good guy, but to that regime they’re a bad guy. To me, the Italian Partisans were good guys. To the fascist dipshits across the world they were bad guys. It’s all subjective. It all depends on who holds the power in a given situation.
The state calls its own violence ‘law’, but that of the individual, ‘crime’.
Second, you cannot backdoor encryption without making it unsafe. To simplify things, think of encryption as a series of complex math problems designed in a way that only the people on either end of the exchange can easily solve them; anyone else has to expend so much time and energy to solve the problems that it becomes pointless to even try. But what happens if you make the problems easier to solve by someone else? Well, you make them easier to solve by someone else. And with enough time studying such an encryption algorithm, that someone else can be anyone else.
“Alright.” You, the strawman I have constructed for this scenario say. “What if we didn’t puncture a huge hole in the security of encryption algorithms in order to allow third party access, and instead just give copies of the keys to the government so they can see what you’re doing?”
Let’s ignore the facts that I’m advocating against state- and corporate-surveillance here. And also how dangerous such an idea is given that governments will abuse any power given to them. Instead let us think about how many literal nuclear weapons these people have lost. Do you really think they can do better with encryption keys? And don’t even get me started on how much worse advertising would be if those profit-hungry mega-corporations (who already sell massive amounts of your information for a quick buck) could read everything.
There is no such thing as harmless power.
Nestor Makhno
TL;DR: if a message can be decrypted by anyone other than its sender or recipient, then the message is not secure.
There are no grey areas here. Either we all have privacy and security, or none of us do. And personally, I’d rather live in a world where I can protect my data from bad actors, even if those bad actors get the same protections as I do. Because it’s not just about hiding things. It’s about staying free. It’s about staying safe.
How?
We do not live in the world the 90s cypherpunks imagined. Very few people outside of weird internet circles give a shit about cryptographic signatures or anything like that. People want convenience more than they want safety and freedom. I’m no exception, and neither are you. Probably.
And frankly, just like all of our other rights, we need to give a little up to actually live. Not to the extend that we already have, mind you, but some. We give up our ability to walk into a crowded movie theater and yell “fire” in exchange for not being trampled to death by a crowd of frantic moviegoers. And I mean, if I really wanted to remain 100% private and 100% free, I’d need to move to a cabin in rural Idaho with nothing but a shotgun and a typewriter. And let me tell you, if I only had a single shotgun with me I’d be the least armed person in rural Idaho.
Even so, there are some things we can do, if not outright need to do, in order to reclaim and protect our privacy in the current era of democratic backsliding and mass surveillance.
Use Open Source Software
Free/libre open source software is not a silver bullet for privacy and security. Running it in place of proprietary software will not let you magically escape the various surveillance programs operated by the state and capital, but it can reduce the surface are for such surveillance. And open source software has far more eye on it than proprietary software, so any major security flaws that could be exploited by bad actors (be they criminals or intelligence agencies) can be found far quicker; that’s part of the reason why all the good encryption algorithms are open source, while the proprietary ones get broken constantly. Remember the XZ backdoor? If it had been closed source, there’s a chance the observant developer may have never found the backdoor, and then most of the internet would have been (and this is, I promise, the proper technical term) turbofucked. Now sure, if it had been closed source, maybe this particular backdoor would have never been added in the first place, but there’s plenty of backdoors included proprietary software just waiting to be used by someone other than the one who put them in (if they haven’t been already).
Google Chrome is the most popular web browser as of 2025, and while it’s based on the open source Chromium and gets some of the benefits of open source software development, it is not itself open source. On top of that, Google makes a significant amount of money from advertising, and if you use Chrome, your browsing data is being sold to advertisers as part of this. Hell, if you use any Google Services (Search, Cloud, Android, and so on) your data is being sold to advertisers and passed along to intelligence agencies. Now, it’s unlikely that you’re going to stop using Google in full (I still don’t even with knowing all of this), but you can make a few changes to limit what data they can collect on you.
Use Firefox (or perhaps one of its derivatives like LibreWolf) instead of Chrome. Mozilla admittedly has its problems, but Firefox ain’t the leading non-Chromium browser for nothing. And in addition to being a move to support your privacy, using Firefox (or something else not based on Chromium) is also a way to ensure that one single for-profit company (Google) doesn’t hold de facto control over web standards. I’m not saying web standards are a bad thing, but they should probably be decided by the community of people who actually work on and use the web. Not one single group of people beholden only to themselves and their shareholders.
Use GrapheneOS instead of stock Android. I guess LineageOS is fine too if you don’t have a Google Pixel.
Apple shares many of the same issues as Google (the harvesting of user data and participation in mass warrantless surveillance), so iPhones are not a more private alternative to Androids no matter how much lip service they pay to the idea at Cupertino.
Use Proton or Tuta instead of Gmail. Proton also actually offers a suite of services to replace several other consumer-level Google services as well; like Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, and so on!
Proton is also integrated with SimpleLogin, so you can easily generate email aliases. No need to give out your real email address! Firefox Relay provides a similar service as well if you don’t go with Proton.
Use privacy-respecting search engines like DuckDuckGo or StartPage. They aren’t perfect, as they still advertise and pull much of their results from less-than-ideal sources (Microsoft’s Bing and Google Search), but they’re still better than the alternative.
Microsoft and Apple maintain a near-total dupoloy over consumer operating systems. It may be true that only obsessive nerds use anything other than Windows or Mac OS X, but it’s also true that these two corporate behemoths use their software to harvest data on behalf of advertisers and intelligence agencies just like Google with its browser. Apple also loves their walled garden, and actively hinders your ability to run anything from outside their ecosystem. So what can you do to ensure your privacy and software freedom? Run Linux of course! Or a BSD I guess.
Arch Linux and its derivatives are great for freaks like myself, but something like Fedora or Ubuntu is fine for normal people just looking to regain a bit of control; they both have strong corporate ties (Fedora to IBM by way of Red Hat, and Ubuntu does quite a bit of advertisement fuckery), but the concern is far lower than with either windows of Mac OS X.
Thanks to WINE (and Valve’s additions to WINE), many applications (and games) for Windows run seamlessly on most Linux distributions.
Using WINE can expose you to some mostly-Windows problems, like malware, albeit to a lesser degree than actually running Windows.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as GNU/Linux, is in fact, systemd/GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, systemd plus GNU plus Linux.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as systemd/GNU/Linux, is in fact, xorg/systemd/GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, xorg plus systemd plus GNU plus Linux.
Everyone’s switching to Wayland now.
If you’re coming from Mac OS X or prefer real UNIX (and not just a work-alike), FreeBSD may be a better choice for you. Mac OS X is actually part of the BSD family tree. And unlike Linux, which isn’t actually real UNIX, FreeBSD more-or-less descends directly from the original UNIX (much of the original UNIX code was rewritten, but that’s the way she goes). BSDs are also complete operating systems, and not separate components welded together as is the case with most Linux distros; that’s usually not a problem given they’re skillfully welded together in most Linux distros, but some folks may prefer the completeness.
I can’t speak from my own experience, but I hear that BSDs have decent enough compatibility layers for most Linux applications, including WINE (meaning Windows applications should probably run as well).
If you’re even more paranoid than me, but not paranoid enough to write your own OS or or speak directly to god, then OpenBSD would be even better for you.
Besides browsers and OSs, there are a number of other pieces of open source software that you can use in place of propriety software like LibreOffice and GIMP. Despite all of that, I’m not a zealot. I’ll use proprietary/closed source tools if they do what I need them to do, so long as I’m not sacrificing too much of my freedom to do so.
Use Ad Blockers
I’ve spoken quite a bit about advertisers, and while I won’t directly quote/link to Bill Hicks here, I hope my disdain for them came through clearly.
There’s nothing free in this world. I get it. If I’m not paying for something with money, I’m paying with my time or data. But why would I want to pay at all (no matter the currency) if all I’m paying for is fucking ads? I can’t even watch something on the streaming service my wife and I pay for (using real money) without being hammered by endless requests to purchase another product; in some cases the product is an upgrade to the next tier of the streaming service itself where you don’t get hammered with ads. It’s ridiculous. Advertisers pay to put the ads somewhere, and I pay to see them. If I want them gone I can pay a little more.
Personal gripes aside, advertisers rarely seem to do their due diligence in making sure the ad buyers aren’t absolute scum or malicious actors. So ad blocking has simply become a matter of digital self defense.
On my browsers (Desktop and Mobile), I’m using UBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, both of which I highly recommend. The latter should work on most browsers, but if you’re still using something in the Chromium family then UBlock Origin Lite should work in place of the former due to how Google is currently enshittifying the web with their capitalist vampirism.
While ad blocking web browser extensions are great, they only work within the browser. Your phone has applications. And I guess your TV and refrigerator do too now (which is fucking ridiculous). So you really do need something stronger to protect the devices on your home network from this constant stream of bullshit. And for that, I recommend running a PiHole or two to sinkhole DNS requests made to advertisers, trackers, and malicious sites. I run 3 (because I am insane) and in addition to the several lists of bad domains I’ve collected from various Reddit threads, I use cloudflared to send my DNS requests over HTTPS to Quad9 and Cloudflare’s anti-malware resolvers. This setup works so well that my wife actually complains about ads reappearing on various apps when we go out.
Encrypt Your Internet Traffic
When you’re not at home wrapped in the protection of your PiHoles that send secure DNS requests to anti-malware resolvers, a trustworthy VPN to encrypt your traffic and add an extra layer of protection is probably a good idea; it’s almost a necessity if you don’t trust the network you’re connected to, but just try to avoid connecting to any of those (or any open network). Hell, it’s still probably a good idea to use a VPN at home, but that may require you to do some network magic on your router and/or configure your VPN client to use custom DNS servers (those being your PiHoles). ProtonVPN and Mozilla VPN are my suggested choices, but there are plenty of others out there. Just be sure whatever you pick is trustworthy, as encryption can only go so far when you’re otherwise trusting them with all of your traffic.
In addition to a VPN, you should use Tor. I don’t mean at the same time. At least not all the time. This post from The Tin Hat goes over the benefits and drawbacks of using Tor and a VPN much better than I ever could, but the gist is that they are different tools with different (albeit related) use cases. That said, ProtonVPN lets you route things through their VPN and Tor pretty easily and without issue.
And don’t just use Tor alone. The browser bundle is great for general privacy and anonymity when browsing the web, but sometimes even that’s not enough. Consider using TAILS, the Linux distro intended to be run from a live disk (USB or DVD) that routes all of your computer’s traffic through Tor and leaves no trace on your machine.
I2P is also worth a mention. While it has a few outproxies to the clear web, it seems far more focused on hidden services than enabling anonymous browsing. Good thing you don’t have to pick and choose between Tor and I2P. You can use both!
Encrypt Everything Else Too
Your data doesn’t just exist in transit across the internet though. It sits, often unencrypted, on whatever devices you’re sending it from and receiving it to. So you should change that and use full disk/device encryption. On your desktop, your laptop, your phone, and your portable external storage. On everything! Most OSs have some feature built in to do this, but you can also use Veracrypt if you find that lacking for some reason. You should also be taking frequent backups of all your devices, and then encrypt those backups as well; make several (still encrypted) backups of important files and store them in separate places.
If you’re not using a service like Proton that already does it for you (or you are and just want an extra layer of security), encrypt your email with PGP/GPG. If you still use an instant messenger (like it’s 2002 again), encrypt your messages with OTR messaging. Stop sending plaintext SMSs and start sending encrypted texts with Signal. My soap says “Dilute!”. This blog says “Encrypt!”
Use Other Tools
Even if you encrypt everything, you’re fucked if you have weak passwords/passphrases that can be broken quickly. Current recommendations for password strength assume that you’ll actually be remembering all your passwords. But you know what’s even better? Remembering only one or two passwords that meet this recommendation and using long, strong, and random passwords for literally everything else and storing them in a(n encrypted) password manager. Also using (non-SMS) MFA. I’d personally suggest Bitwarden or Proton Pass (both of which have built-in MFA authenticators), but there are others out there. Just be sure to pick one that didn’t have three major security incidents over the past decade.
Financial transactions are a fact of life in our current economic system, so they are yet another thing to consider in regards to your privacy; a lot about a person can be figured out based on where they spend their money. Cash is nice for real world privacy, but cryptocurrencies are worth mentioning as a means of maintaining your financial privacy on the internet online due to their anonymity and decentralized nature. They aren’t perfect, however. Exchanges threaten their decentralization, and the level of anonymity provided by a cryptocurrency varies from coin to coin with Bitcoin actually being pseudonymous and not actually anonymous (if you want real anonymity then you’d probably want to use Monero or something of that sort, keeping in mind altcoins are generally not as spendable as Bitcoin). There are also legitimate concerns about the enormous amount energy required of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (which could probably be resolved if we switched to more renewable sources), rug pulls/pump-and-dumps orchestrated by grifters, and the ongoing state-backed crypto-fuckery we’re seeing in certain places.
A power drill is another necessary part of not only your physical toolkit, but your privacy toolkit as well. When you erase a file on a disk you should know that it isn’t really gone until you overwrite it, and until then, it can be recovered with enough knowledge and the right forensic tools. There is software that can be used to securely erase data (like nwipe), but frankly, nothing beats physical destruction of the disk.
In short, you should use as many tools as you can to keep yourself free and safe in the digital world. Using them may make things less convenient, but just like you sometimes trade a bit of of your freedom for rights, you ought to sometimes trade a little of your convenience for freedom.
Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man’s lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one’s self.
Tired of your same old CMS? Maybe take a small vacation from it and try this out. I’ll be your trail guide for this rustic web authoring adventure. While this is a vacation and it will have its charms, we will be roughing it, so be prepared to explore this computer history wilderness. Luckily, you can leave your bear mace at home.
We’re going to blog like you’ve never blogged before. Blog like it’s 1999… or rather 1997. Experience the future of yesterday’s content management systems and WYSIWYG editors, today!
When I was invited to be a part of Reclaim Open 2025, I decided I would use the opportunity as a challenge to do something I’d been mulling over for a long time: creating a zine.
I tried my hand at zine making while I was at Reclaim, for a project that unfortunately had to be put on the backburner. Since then, I’ve been curious about revisiting it, and seeing what would be possible. I’ve had a couple of ideas bouncing around. This seemed like a good time to try.
The challenge I set for myself was to make two open-source zines, print-ready, and blog about it in time for the conference. And, well, here’s the writeup!
Results
CTRL+S: Preserving Your Work for the Long Haul is a short primer on planning resilient digital projects and preserving and archiving them, so that when the time comes for them to be sunsetted, it’s easy for you to preserve their core attributes and archive them as best as possible.
Web-Native Cryptids & Creatures: A Spotter’s Guide is a little trifold fun-facts style starter guide to various web safety and digital literacy topics, in the style of an Audubon birdwatcher’s pamphlet.
Both of them are available as a for-print PDF and a more web-readable PDF (no need to download if you don’t want, you should be able to click through and view online). I’m not going to embed them here so that this post doesn’t become unreadably long.
Before I started, I had the idea that I would actually try and make three zines. Then I sat down, tried to think of concepts, and blocked out a project plan for each zine. And then I changed my mind. Two would be plenty, actually.
Of the concepts I picked, I went with one serious one and one fun one. CTRL+S is based on work I did at both Carleton College and Reclaim Hosting, on how to create and preserve resilient digital projects. Web Native Cryptids & Creatures is based on the fact that when I was little I had a trifold birdwatcher pamphlet that was basically the coolest thing ever.
Naturally, the fun zine turned out to be a lot more stressful than the serious one.
Planning
The first thing I did was to decide on the structure. That would inform any outlining and writing, so even if I wasn’t actually doing layout right away, planning it still had to come first.
I wanted each zine to fit on a double-sided sheet of printer paper. The cryptid zine was going to be a trifold “spotter’s guide” style thing, so it could have six pages (three front, three back). There was no particular style in mind for the preservation zine, so I decided to go with eight pages (four front, four back). I figured if I had to divide each topic onto its own page, sixteen was way too many and four might not be enough.
The thing with laying stuff out for print is that stuff ends up in a weird order, upside-down, or both. I have several index cards that I folded and numbered in order to figure out what layout would end up having to look like.
Drafting
When in doubt, start with outlines.
Since the preservation zine was based on work I’d already done, I reviewed the original handout, identified the two main topics, and made a list of other topics that I’d learned more about since then. There was nothing that strictly followed anything else, but I organized it into an order that seemed like it would flow well for people new to the topic, and then started making bullet points.
The cryptid zine was meant to be a silly piece. I only needed five actual profiles, since one page would be for the title/credits, so I made a list of monster puns and then tried to narrow it down to the most plausible. But the actual writing was a balancing challenge: how do I make sure this is at least semi-useful… while also keeping it fun… and not too long… and also, what even is this strange thing called “humor”?
It turns out that writing about topics you’ve presented on countless times is significantly simpler than trying to be funny on purpose. Go figure.
Layout
Layout was my shining star amidst the trenches of writing. I spent more time doing it than I expected, but that’s because it felt like such a breeze that I would look at the clock and be surprised by how quickly the time had passed.
I had a genuinely great time playing with where the words would go, and how big, and what font, and what size margins. The slowest it ever got was when I spent an hour or two trying to manually set up a guideline grid that would match the cryptid zine’s trifold structure. Then I googled “affinity publisher column layout” and figured it out immediately.
This also served as an extra editing pass. Moving the words into Affinity Publisher meant looking for ways to trim the bits that were too long, and rearrange anything that didn’t make sense.
Illustration
I checked my notes from while I was doing illustrating and all I found was screaming. The illustrations were all for the cryptid zine, and they were part of what was so stressful about it. I used to draw more, but I’m very rusty, and the first day I tried it was dispiriting. All my ideas seemed terrible, and nothing I drew looked at all like I wanted it to.
I hit a point where I was just relieved that the preservation zine didn’t have space for illustrations, because the cryptid zine was freaking me out so much. It didn’t help that I hadn’t thought about the time I would need to draw, so it was getting very close to the deadline I had set for myself.
In the end I took a step back. I came back the next day, did some extra warm ups, found more reference images, and went, “This is the fun zine. What matters is that illustrating it is also fun.” I could be silly with it, I told myself.
And then I drew the Loch Ness Monster in sunglasses and a trenchcoat and had a great time.
Reflections
I’m glad I did this. For all my grumping, I had a great time with this project. Every time I hit a point of frustration, I would pause, take a break, come back, and almost immediately get in a groove. Giving myself two zines to switch between also helped a lot — when I was well and truly stuck on one, there was always something to do on the other, so I could just change gears.
There’s a bunch of stuff I was hoping to have done in time for the conference that, in the end, I don’t. I wanted to put together web-page versions and get them archived on the WayBack Machine, and I’m going to do that. I wanted to try interviewing other zine makers and blog about those conversations, and I didn’t get to it. But the goal for the conference was to have two print-ready PDFs, and I did manage that.
So if you’re thinking about making a zine, let this be your sign!
And these zines are openly-licensed, so if they’re helpful to you, please go ahead and use them! I’d love to hear about it if you do.
I guess it makes sense to start a conference about blogging with a blog post about blogging—hello you beautiful Reclaim Open 25 folks! Let’s face it, blogging is a blogger’s favorite topic, right? And these days I’ve been thinking about what it means for blogging to transmogrify (it’s Halloween season, after all) into something else. Most often a blog is the fodder for a book, which makes total sense given the textual base and the general sense that blogging is always a work-in-progress—in my case always becoming something legible 🙂 But I never was all that interested in writing books because it seems like a lot work, and I’m already holding on for dear life with keeping up with this here blog.Read the full post: https://bavatuesdays.com/were-not-computers-sebastian-were-physical/
If all the technical widgetry works, this post will be published November 4 at the time it will be revealed as its own post on the Reclaim Open Conference, as my slot on the “Blog-a-thon” day. In the saturated metaphor nature of this post, consider this post having being rooted here but transplanted to the conference web site.
The conference theme of “Rewilding the Network” is an absolute appeal to me. Given the fill-in-the-blank-dystopic-adjective state of the “web” (I have grown fond of grimdark) you can find a good trail of calls to “rewild” the internet, to take it back from the corporate profit barons who seem to have sucked the soul of what many of us were called for in some past era of optimism.
It sounds great, right? What does it mean? In my own spirit of rewilding, gathering the elements from across the web land, I am old school tagging this stuff rewildingweb in pinboard. But I get ahead of myself. As usual in my blog format. My structure is… wild.
Strap yourself in for a long read, tons of photos, links, over extended metaphors, guaranteed typos, an ultra marathon effort for the blogathon.
I was going to write a whole long backstory how as a loner suburban kid I made wild landscaping a hobby, and carried on– but I already wrote that post! The key is taking it to a new level where I am now, a 16 acre rural property in Southern Saskatchewan. Surrounded by cultivated farm fields, my wife and I are taking on an experimental “wilding” project based some on discovering not far away, a very un-prairie like experimental forest started in the 1930s. We are doing that now.
My original, partly thought out idea for this “session by blog” was quickly slid into the web form months ago. Heck, I was still outside in my garden. This was the pitch
For me, a bit of the exuberance in “Rewilding the Internet” suggest a mob of people grabbing tools and going out to go about this act of rewilding. Drawing from personal experiences, completely informed of rewilding practices on land where I grew up in Maryland, to the deserts of Arizona, to now a 16 acre property in Saskatchewan, I suggest a few elements important to rewilding, metaphorically stretched to the land of the internet.
Rewilding is often not doing things, letting the land go and grow, giving space for it to do its own thing
Much of the ideas come from just walking around and noticing details, being aware of the conditions where you are
At the same time, weed pulling, pruning, trimming, maybe even chainsaws are necessary
Using hand tools can more rewarding/satisfying than power tools
Rewilding works by reclaiming found materials
You ought to get your hands dirty, push them into the soil
Rewilding is hard work over a long period
When the systems are working, you can generate growth by propagating from elsewhere in your land, not needing to buy plants from stores
Rewilding can be successful and sustainable but you learn via experiment/experience and also fail some along the way
Expect lots of pictures of real rewilding where my wife and I are turning a prairie into a forest! And maybe dogs romping in the wild.
I will stick to those elements, bend and mold them, and again, likely overreach in terms of making a comparison to web technology. You might have to wade through a lot of over explanation. And a few stories. It’s all ripe for breaking apart.
It’s my blog, even if it lives as a leaning fence post on the Reclaim Open web site!
Dark Forest down to the Dark Web, diagram by Maggie Appleton, in The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web. The site is copyrighted, so likely is this, and thus I am breaking the damn law. I will rely onan understnading of pure fandom and appreciation for this so accurate illustration. Send the lawyers over.
I dream of the wide open forest that I first came across in 1993 and was what I knew for the bulk fo my career since. It harkens back to the simple, naive? brilliant piece by Mike Calufield (hi Mike) The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral – the gardens of then are largely abandoned, the streams either dried up, polluted, or just gurgling sewage flows now. The gardens are underground, and we swim through various cozy webs, dreaming of that damn one big social tent.
But let’s get on to the rewilding and all the metaphors.
1. Rewilding is often not doing things, letting the land go and grow, giving space for it to do its own thing
The previous owner of our rural property warned us about the 11 hours it took him to cut all the grass. He did mow everything. Most of the fields were dry, cracked soil with scattered cut dead grass. Plus there were signs where they had driven snow mobiles trampling shrubs. The most transformation thing we have done is to not do something– to let the grass grow. Long. Longer roots improve the soil, it traps snow (melt) and moisture, and keeps the surface cool. Wild flowering clover and other flowers have been filling in. It happens on its own.
We have a slough in the back that was dug by original settlers. When we came here, it was a dry hole. In the bottom was a shooting target and bullet debris everywhere. Letting the grass grow enabled snow melt to stay, and we have a year round pond. We have ducks, geese, and… loud frogs! Where did the frogs come from? The willows on the side have spread and grown much taller. It teems with life.
I don’t have enough “before” photos, but this was last year, the old fence built by settlers has elmost been engulfed by grass.
Not cutting means also the poplar trees that line the edges of the property (sparse in many spots) are doing the rhizome thing. This photo below was the very first year, 2021. The tiny poplars that came up maybe 1 foot tall are now 12, 15 feet high. It’s like a free forest just building itself. That grass now is 3 feet high.
The thing about rewilding is how much is contextual- we have room here for more trees and welcome the spreading. In cities, the way poplars spread can almost be a nuisance. Back in June 2025, Laura Hilliger in “Roots and Rewilding” wrote about poplars in her urban garden areas being “the bane of my existence”:
Oh I loved the trees, don’t get me wrong. It took me over a decade to admit that something had to be done. Poplars shimmer in the wind. Poplars provide good trunks for hammocks. Poplars are trees for God’s sake. I hemmed and hawed about cutting down the poplars, the only trees on the north side of the yard. Every year I busted my ass trying to keep the poplar root systems contained. I tried, against the natural order of things, to build ecosystems amongst them. I tried to let them live their lives.
And then I admitted defeat and cut them down. For the project of rewilding what I could, I cut down the poplars. Cutting down a poplar tree, by the way, is not enough to get rid of the root system. The trees propagate vis a vie their roots and I, uneducated as I was in the habits of poplar trees, waited until they had spread across the entire yard so nothing else would grow amongst the thousand of little poplar trees trying to become a forest. I cut them down a decade too late. [FBT] on Roots and Rewilding
Lessons for Web Rewilding
It mmight be a stretch, but there are definitely times where choosing not to create or intercede or toss a piece of technology is better, especially in a community. I remember many e3xperience where someone in my work ircle had asked a question, and maybe I did not get around to answering, but remember what a thrill it was when i got back to someone they said, “Oh I was able to figure it out.” This is always better.
Or I can also find a parallel from the days of teaching the DS206 Digital Storytelling course. Many media classes revolve around teaching using specific software, you end uop teaching software. In DS106 we never knew what students had available, so we suggested, say for graphics, to use Photoshop if they had access to it, but would offer suggestions to try say the open source GIMP or even web base visual editing tools. It was so freeing not teaching how to use software, but setting up students to identify what they had and then having to learn a bit on their own.
The tendency in our field is to rush in with technosolutions and “fix” things, when sometimes, maybe we should just let systems grow.
2. Much of the ideas come from just walking around and noticing details, being aware of the conditions where you are
The lessons I find in rewilding and letting things go is also appreciating what you have to work with from conditions. The climate. I see those happy gardening gurus in social media video in places where water often falls from the sky or the soil is is just lush and soft.
Well, this bit of land is extremely dry and not only that, we have winters that dip close to -40º (where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet) and summers that can peak near 40º. Rain happens, but is an event, and muh of our planting effort has to consider how to water. You pay close attention to the subtlest of land tilts, the prairie looks table flat, but our home actually sits on a small rise, maybe 15-20 feet higher than the elevation at the road.
Each weather year has been different. Some of the keys to summer growth is how much snow gathers in winter and melts. One year we acculumated snow drifts 18 feet high that in Spring melted, flooding some areas and filling our pond. Other winters we have gotten significantly less. Some summers have two or more months without rain, yet the summer of 2025 we had some precipitation almost every week from June through the end of July.
Our first year we actually hired an exploratory well dug to see if we had any aquifer water – nope. We considered a lot of irrigation ideas, but the most effective has been a small trailer we pull with a utility vehicle, it has a 100 gallon tank, a car battery to power a pump, even a solar panel used to recharge the battery. This has worked effectlvely to supplement water as needed.
And we also just do a lot of noticing, a favorite activity is just walking the lands. watching for changes, noting what thrives, seeing patterns in what bushes spread, be it by root or seed. Or looking to see what happens when you transplant what is already thriving in the vicinity.
Along our gravel roads driving to our house, in the summer you see a lot of yellow flowers, brown-eyed susans, just growing wild, maybe just from the road runoff. They happen to be a favorite flower for my wife, Cori. Maybe 3 years ago, I stopped in July to cut some for her, but had no scissors or blade, so I just yanked a few out with their roots.
I ended up planting 4 of them in our front garden, which had been the first year, an ongoing battle with weeds. Well, they have spread and each year form a thick hedge of 4 foot flowers, which now I end up digging up in the Spring and transplanting elsewhere. A patch around our septic tank which again, previously was weeds, is now a lush flower garden, plus with wild violets and mint which have been showing up more and more each year.
A lot of our rewinding is just moving things around! You have to give them a little a water attention, but the local stuff is hardy. You dont have to buy all the plants!
Lessons for Web Rewilding
We don’t always need systems and vendors software! Why not see what smaller tools are thriving and in use where you do your own noticing. Or getting a better conceptual understanding how things like RSS feeds and APIs work so you can perhaps patch together your own approaches.
I have gotten so much mileage over my work years by a suite of my own JavaScript bookmarklets, some I have seen growing elsewhere and modified or learned how they make use of selected text on a web page.
Or practicing the lost art of view source to have an understanding what goes on in a web page (getting harder with all these fancy pants frameworks). Knowing how to clean up URLs or even change the variables in the parameter string to make them do something different.
Without this foundation, you could end up dependent on just whatever pops out of the machine when you type into a box.
3. At the same time, weed pulling, pruning, trimming, maybe even chainsaws are necessary
Not all that grows on your land is good! Let’s talk about weeds, which yes, philosophically, is just an unwanted flower. With our gree grass turf lawn at the family home, my Dad was relentless in digging out the dandelions. I have disdained them, though when visiting Barbara Ganley in Vermont years back, she made a strong case for appreciating their beauty.
On our 16 acres, I have given in that dandelions will be abundant in places, though from step 1, letting the grass grow long does much to crowd them out.
I can let dandelions go… but not russian thistle. They aer EVIL, sure seen on a hoke, the flowers are attractive, but they just dominate places they get a strong hold. They are spiky, and if not agressive on pulling, can dominate the vegetable garden.
I have a regular war going on with thistles, and I slowly get ahead by relentless pulling when I find them. In some cases, where they have gotten too thick, I have used spray to nuke them, but really, balltling weeds is best done long term by a regular practice of yanking them out.
Weeding is ongoing, from pulling out small ones before they get a foothold to wholesale clearing when they do.
Lessons for Web Rewilding
There are so many weeds on the web just a few are spammers, phishers, bugs in the code. There is constant weeding if you write in a blog and are crazy enough to have comments- the spam is always knocking at the door. We now have the invasive species of AI crawlers, who invited them in? Now we need to add fences?
Some weedings takes deliberate hand pulling, some do requite more powerful chemicals. But it comes with the territory, to desire for no web weeds is not recognizing the dual nature of humans where some that take any open opportunity to profit or abuse.
Amongst the weeds I find annoying these days are the infestation of ads, popups, and pay.subscription walls from seemingly every other click that get in the way of web interaction. But you can get some satisfaction by jumping paywalls.
4. Using hand tools can more rewarding/satisfying than power tools
Perhaps “rewarding/satisfying” is not the best reason, but I’d say doing the work yourself creates a closer connection to the process. Sure, if money was in large supply, we could have full sized trees brought in, hire backhoes to dig, and plop trees in. But the hand work, be it digging, clearing a garden bed, doing the spring time tree planting just feels good.
Each year we do massive tree planting starting in the spring. We take advantage of a program run by the SaskPower utility – the heat from an electric plant runs a greenhouse in Estevan, and we can put in requests as rural land owners for large numbers of trees and shrubs.
We’ve tried various methods. The first year we invited friends out to do a mass planting, we had marked numerous places with colored stakes (to identify the tree type) and had them use a “dibble bar” method of planting we had seen on a web video – mainly opening a pocket in the ground, inserting a saplig and pressing it closed.
It works well if you have soft ground! Many of those first year plantings did not make it. We have revised each year, and honestly found its best to do the work ourselves ;-). We had much more success last year with a method of clearing grass with a battery powered hedge trimmer, scraping with a pick axe, drilling with a portable battery powered auger– and yes, there are “power” tools at pay, so its not an universal rule. But the work is ours.
Maybe the most important thing we have learned is to put down a layer of straw as a mulch- it keeps moisture in, and our plantings surrounded by straw have done tehe best (we use this in our vegetable garden too).
Maybe our success last year, with numerous small surviving pines and poplars going into winter now, is this refined method. Or maybe it was better rain last summer. You just do not know for sure.
But the satisfaction of doing it yourself cannot be topped.
Lessons for Web Rewilding
This is the obvious call for using where you can, DIY web approaches, using open source tools, learning methods from others. And just doing much of the work yourself. It takes more time, effort, sweat. You try and fail, try again and get some success.
But web rewilding the web hinges on individuals, small groups, not companies, not even organizations all the time who may ot stay with the effort.
Sure one can by fancy wood garden structures, perfect building stone, but there is more satisfaction here in using what is found on the land. We have used / reclaimed old lumber, barn board, piles of rocks, old cut wood, fallen tree limbs, the mulch that acccumulates below the establish shrubs.
The land ends up being full of both natural and human made materials. In 2021 I built a garden box for growing herbs using a pile of old exterior doors that were piled next to a shed, and covering with reclaimed barnwood.
Three years ago, during a relatively not cold December day, our family discovered a cache of buried bricks, likely 100 years old, under brush and even trees on en edge of the property. We have a fall tradition of going out and reclaiming the bricks (to be used for garden edging and and plans for some hill top setting areas, maybe path making?). Just two weeks ago, the four of us managed to pull some 450 out of the ground for future use.
And as a previous farming property, we always find remnants of old implements, rusty wheels, plows, even a former cart with one shredded tire left that we have pulled out and moved to a more visible display area. Not all rewilding is just growing, much is in making interesting visual displays (that maybe shrubs and flowers might grow around?)
This lesson does not take much to spell out. My own web rewilding is based much on open sources / shared code found that others have shared, the methods and approaches to their own web work that are documented on blogs (cough, e.g. D’Arcy Norman still narrating his tech work). It’s as well taking advantage of open licensed media, attributing credit to the sharer, rather than just grabbing Generated garbage media.
Reclaiming the web is not just a rebel yell, it is maybe the most essential act to reinforce the entire system.
Using the “easy to grab” materials yields a “same as” style, plasticity, that lacks the human feel of old wood and rusted metal. Maybe not everyone’s flavor, but this is to me the most key rewilding web factor- heck it is the name of a respectable web enterprise 😉
6. You ought to get your hands dirty, push them into the soil
7. Rewilding is hard work over a long period
8. When the systems are working, you can generate growth by propagating from elsewhere in your land, not needing to buy plants from stores
In the interest of time and not making a 90 ton blog post, I admit these items have already been mentioned above. Getting the hands dirty is just the call for doing as much yourself, or at least coming to an understanding how things work, not accepting black box vending machine solutions.
It does call for dedication, and pretty often you might look beyond your own property / web sites and wonder why you are doing this when so much looks bright and shiny elsewhere.
Cori and I enjoyed a fantastic experiment last winter. On a snowy day we gathered a small bucket of closed pine cones. We brought them in, soaked in warm water, than let site a few days on a radiator.
They opened up and yielded scores of seeds. We planted them and grew our own saplings under grow lights. This year we planted about 80 of them, and are nurturing a few more for next year’s plantings.
That this is possible with found pine cones makes a suggestion to me what we can do with bits of web seeds.
9. Rewilding can be successful and sustainable but you learn via experiment/experience and also fail some along the way
Trying things and failing is such the norm. Our first year tree planting was not much of a success, and even having planted thousands of tree saplings over the last four years, maybe the success rate is not worth bragging about.
But going about now, and seeing trees getting near established where before there was cracked land, is just energizing. I get to take daily walks, and this autumn I have been able to send my wife during her teaching day, a regular “fine pine” photo
That these are establishing, where previously there was only cracked dirt, dried grass, and weeds, is remarkable. It suggests we can eventually have something, right here in the middle of the prairie, like the experimental forest that inspired us before we moved here. That we have been able to grow in our garden enough potatoes, onions, squash to go through the winter.
In the experiment department, from last year’s potatoes in the basement was 2 buckets of small rejects, that had grown long shoots over the winter. Rather than just discarding, on a whim this spring, we dug holes at the end of the garden, and buried them. They were not even on our irrigation line, but we harvested some of the best, giant red potatoes from there.
Experimentation and trying is at work all the time here, whether its ideas we pick up from online artlcles and videos, or just things we try ourselves.
Each year we put up some snow fence material in places to reduce the drifts from crossing our driveway. But we found in another area, a snow fence we put up near a structure cfreated a huge snow bank that covered one of our tree groves. All the trees and shrubs planted there benefited from the spring melt of a snow bank that was maybe 40 feet by 20 feet and 4 feet thick.
So this year we are putting more snow fence out in some of the fields to capture snow drifts into banks that might melt. We don’t know if it will work, and much depends on the wind patterns that change each year and each snow storm.
it’s really trying to mimic what we see happen naturally. Having perimeters or shelter belts of tall and thick shrubs (caragana and chokecherry, one introduced the other natural) has in some years trapped huge amounts of snow that just blows across open fields until it hits the barrier. Again, the spring melt of this has a huge transformational effect on our rewilding. Plus it makes for fun snow shoeing!
I fel like I hardly need to make a case for the key role of experimenting and trying new things on the web. It’s too obvious. But it need not mean doing all hand coding and programming -there are so many ways to leverage web tools, services, integrations, clever spreadsheets, small hacks like bookmarklets, that go a long way.
I’d even say you cant do much web rewilding if you are not always experimenting.
And So What?
I had rather grand ambitions with my idea, yet feel somewhat like its just a long winded sprawl with lots of photos. How does one rewild the web? Doing it daily! Always with the curious mind! Again, look at this string of clichés that look generated.
Did I really cover anything here? If you are actually reading by this point, first I tip my hat, but also, I want to hear the critiques, the comments, the shared stories (be they of the web or of the land). Stories of amazing things to me are the soul of the web.
Still I assert the most important and interesting web rewilding is done by individuals. And why do it? I cannot underscore the feeling of small success, even if no one else really pays them much attention. Do the rewilding for yourself, to put a small stake in the land and say, I did this. Don;t look for popularity or clicks or attention. Do the rewilding because you can.
I close with a proud rewildied resident. This pine was planted maybe the first year, and almost lost for two years in the long grass. This summer it put on a growth burst now close to three feet high, with what looks like a durable “trunk”. It’s pretty much established.
But the joy was escalated when I went to examine and found it was holding two precious cones, such a rewarding things to see after just a short time. I expect one day to sit in its shade.
For several years, I’ve been assigning collaborative assignments to small groups of students where each member of the team has a common role and unique role. The class where I use this model most explicitly, WRIT 3152: Digital Community Engagement, has become a service learning class in which students serve as digital strategy consultants for community partners. (I teach a second version of the class in the spring months that focuses on something completely different.) While the class is part of our Professional Writing program in the English Department, it draws on an interdisciplinary approach to teaching the web that involves computer science, marketing, design, and organizational leadership. I enjoy the fact that students can chart their way through the course gaining experience in different roles but on a unique learning path from other students.
I learned the term “build team” from 48in48, a non profit organization in Atlanta that schedules several hackathons per year in which volunteers build free websites for 48 other non profits in 48 hours. 48in48 structures its volunteers (mostly people in the tech industry) into build teams where team members serve as either the project manager, content developer, WordPress designer, or UI/UX specialist. I’ve adapted these roles to the build team concept in my class. Sometimes the roles change to highlight different skills, but typically team members have the option to serve as a project manager, a researcher, a designer, or an editor, the understanding that everyone on the team is also a writer. I’ll offer a breakdown of these roles here and some things that I’ve learned that help students in this environment transition from hating “group work” to learning the concrete skills of collaboration.
Project management: Organizing a team, facilitating conversation, steering a group toward consensus, and keeping people accountable with deadlines — all of these are unique skills that I find some English and Communications majors in my class have in abundance. Sometimes, they have not been invited to use them in our classes. When I give a student the PM role, I am telling them that I have confidence in their ability to lead and assist.
Researcher: In a web-based project, everything is research and curiosity. The researcher on a team should be the person with the license to go down every rabbit hole and gather the most eclectic sources. I stress to students that the researcher job is one that someone can too easily “pretend” to be working, so I always want researchers coming back to their team with citations, annotations, and lists of sources that are beyond what the team needs (so that writers can choose from a wide range of material).
Designer: In my teams, this is the “WordPress” person, and I want to see them learn something new: apply a new theme or plug in, use a new design element, embed media in a new and interesting way. The designer is the person that collects all of the text, image, and web media in order to build the deliverable (a report, a white paper, etc.) to assignment specifications.
Editor: Someone always needs to be the last set of eyes. The best editors can focus on both language and functionality in a finished project. I always prefer an editor to working on text that they did not originate so that the omissions are gaps are clearer. That also means that, because the editor is also a writer, that someone else will need to edit their work.
Other things I have learned constructing, dissolving, encouraging, and sometimes rehab’ing build teams over the years:
Student choice works well but can also tank a project. I want there to be a healthy amount of student choice and my guidance in assigning build teams. I survey students before a project to find out their preference on team members, roles, content (often times that means: what community partner they work with), and time availability. After I get to learn everyone’s strengths, I usually assemble the team from the survey data. I also choose the PM. After that, the team makes the rest of the decisions themselves.
All of the projects my students work on are built in WordPress. I have usually required students to purchase self-hosted domains, but this semester I am exploring a Reclaim Domain that I’ve installed a multisite WordPress instance on, splitting off separate sites for each student.
It’s always best to let students see what build teams look like outside the classroom. I encourage students to volunteer for a 48in48 hackathon, and when they do, I give them time in class to describe the environment. Volunteering alongside tech industry professionals gives my students valuable exposure to values and skill-sets necessary for collaboration in digital careers.
Flexibility is important. Sometimes teams burn out, lose a member, or go off the rails. I give students a “failure is a learning moment” speech every semester, to try to inoculate them from the panic that sets in for some students when a project does not go exactly the way that they wanted it to. I encourage them to look at every collaborative project (I usually do around four) is an opportunity to learn a new skill in community with other people, and that sometimes that skill is supporting other team members through challenges.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Rolling, take one. {plastic button clicks, bird sings, ice cream truck drives by playing its jingle} And it’s just starting now.
This is the future, yes, live in the future, now…
The future fair: A fair for all, and no fair to anybody. Yes, it’s free! Join the expectant crowd gathering now as we stop here…
Come closer folks, don’t crowd the wheels. …and don’t be afraid little people, cuz we’re just holy grams. So climb on aboard. We’re going inside…”
From intro to “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus” by The Firesign Theatre 1971
Learning as Journeys
Learning has always been a journey for me. We say we’re “going” to college for a reason. I became a journeyman glassblower pursuing my craft. My favorite learning journeys are road trips. Whether I’m on two wheels or four, riding trains, hitchhiking, or taking the bus, I always come home transformed.
For me, The Firesign Theatre captured the 1960s and Nixon-era spirit I grew up in through their improvisation and teamwork. I first heard them on Los Angeles’s listener-supported FM station, but they had practiced their craft as sports reporters on AM radio and college radio stations. Their early albums are chaotic because they put them together from live performances, which led to comedy albums and live shows. “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus” , the fourth in their improvisational series, is still one of my favorites. I invite you to join me in some serious fun.
Bozo: The Original Media Converger
Before we had theories about transmedia storytelling, Bozo did it. In 1946, Johnny Mercer’s Capitol Records in Hollywood created the world’s first read-along book, ”Bozo at the Circus.” It included a record so children could hear the words while learning to read, with sounds telling them when to turn the page. Apparently, this was the first synchronized content delivery across multiple platforms.
From there, Bozo exploded: more read-along records, phonographs and radios, comic books, toys, radio shows, and in 1949, a TV show on the brand-new KTTV channel 11, Los Angeles’s first TV station. Each platform supported the others. The TV Bozo mentioned the comic book Bozo. The toys looked like the TV Bozo. The records told background stories. Every platform increased every other platform’s value. A capitalist media convergence decades before Henry Jenkins wrote about it.
Then in 1956, Larry Harmon bought the character. Instead of producing one centralized show, he sold franchises. At its peak, 183 local television stations each hired their own Bozo, produced their own show, and created their own local content. Each was authentically local and the concept spread to Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Australia. Each was recognizably Bozo. Bozo was a distributed network before computer networks existed.
As a kid, I only knew the LA TV Bozo, but Bozo is still going strong. David Arquette bought the rights from Larry Harmon Pictures in 2021, performs at events, and produced a new record this year: Send in the Bozos.
Our Distributed Digital Circus
Now we’re driving our own buses—our blogs, and micro-blogging on federated platforms. Some use WordPress, some use Ghost, and there are Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and others emerging with new protocols. The DS106 community at combobulating.net is remixing Reclaim Open from Scotland to LA, Canada to Australia, creating a digital circus where everyone’s contribution has equal access and distribution in the connected network.
Bryan Mathers’ graphics for Reclaim capture this perfectly, and his Remixer tool lets me create my own bus images for the conference. Each participant designs their own bus. You can make your own at https://remixer.visualthinkery.com.
We’re all bozos on these connected buses, where the 183 local clown shows in 1956 foreshadowed infinite connected blogs in 2025, where media convergence meets distributed learning, where your journey matters as much as anyone’s.
We’re all on journeys. And we’re all figuring out these new learning spaces together. The journey metaphor invites everyone’s stories: How did you get here? What detours changed your plans? Share your stories in the comments and with your own favorite media. I’ll be blogging at https://connectingislearning.com.
As The Firesign Theatre concluded in “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus”; “…the last guy is weird with a beard. {fireworks exploding} Well, the fireworks are over, only the smoke remains…”
A really common issue for leaders in Higher Ed and elsewhere is worrying about “is it just me who is struggling with this?”. When everyone works from home and all you see is a carefully curated or blurred background with a professional, well-groomed headshot framed by a flattering camera angle, it can be hard to get a sense of how others are coping day to day and easy to feel that you are the only one who is struggling.
I think this is where blogging can not only help, it can become a professional practice superpower.
Open practice in a leadership position is different from sharing things like new publications, or blogging about exciting projects. Many professionals in leadership roles maintain public profiles or a web presence like a blog. What I’m interested in is not necessarily about having a blog, but about the practice of blogging in itself.
The process of getting whatever you want to say in a post and press publish.
It’s about the joy of blogging, the sheer exuberance of having a space, a domain, to make your own. A vault or a personal archive as I’ve blogged about before.
It opens up a space to share the practice of leading, of managing people, not just the end results – and the reflective space it opens up can be incredibly powerful.
There are however some barriers to blogging, especially in a leadership role. When you are everyone’s boss, it’s not always easy to maintain an authentic space on the open web. So I use a couple of strategies to blog about my professional practice, specifically:
Choose a format that works: I vary how and where I blog, from my main WordPress site to voice recordings.
Modify how openly to share: from public, to semi-private to fully locked-down depending on topic.
Keep a list for the long term: I could use a tool to track projects, publications and other activities for me, but there’s great value for me in the act of processing what I have done and reflecting on it as I make and update the list.
To conclude, I also want to share one more strategy that I have found particularly useful over the years, which is to engage in conversational blogging, or co-leadership conversations. There are a range of conversational approaches that I have used to create the space needed to reflect together and blogging can be a great tool for that, too.
Thanks for reading my contribution to Reclaim Open 🙂
The Daily Create (TDC) is a creative challenge that is published every day at 5am EST, free and open to all. For many years the link to the day’s challenge was tweeted to the #DS106 hashtag, nowadays it toots to the same hashtag on Mastodon, where we Daily Creators still participate and riff off each other. Some of us complete the TDC every day, others dip in and out from time to time. There are no prizes, and no sanctions. The only rule is to MAKE ART, DAMMIT!
Join us, a group of regular and irregular Daily Creators, as we chat about all things TDC. In this session we’ll talk about many things. Likely topics will be:
Motivations for participation in the daily create
The echoes involved when one person riffs on someone else or a previous response
The theory of remix and bricolage that underpins these types of practices
What an affinity group is, and how this might explain the connections that are built in remix activities
How the TDC is a gateway into digital literacy, with free and open resources
We will also each introduce some of our favourite challenges from past daily creates to give a flavour of why we keep returning to participate in the TDC.
Finally, we would like to take the opportunity to issue an open invitation to everyone to join us in the open and participate in future daily creative activities. But beware – #DS106 is #4Life!
