Bradley Andrews

💬 The IndieWeb is Punk Manifesto I now swear by:

THE INDIEWEB IS PUNK MANIFESTO

Three chords and a domain name.

You don’t need a deal with a label. You don’t need a platform’s blessing. All you need is an out of tune guitar you can barely play, or a free text editor and a web host. That’s it. That’s the whole scene.

I. WE ARE THE DIY KIDS

Punk didn’t wait for labels to say yes. It plugged in a blown out amp in someone’s basement and played anyway. Bad singer? Makes no difference. Three chords? You go. Own a drum kit but never had a lesson? You’re the drummer now.

The IndieWeb works the same way. Nobody’s waiting for permission to publish a website. You don’t need a “content strategy.” You don’t need a niche. You need a place that’s yours, and the nerve to hit publish.

Sometimes it’s ugly. It’s the wrong font. It’s a blog post about nothing at all. It works and it’s yours.

II. WE OWN THE MASTERS NOW

In the old days, the music industry owned the masters, the distribution, the airwaves. You made the music; they made the money and decided if anyone got to hear it.

Big platforms run the same racket. You write the posts, build the audience, generate the engagement, and they own the feed, the algorithm, and the right to bury you or boot you whenever it suits the shareholders.

Not here. Own your domain. Own your data. Own your identity. Your words live on infrastructure you control, not on borrowed servers that can evict you without notice.

III. NO A&R, NO VENTURE CAPITAL, NO GATEKEEPERS

No punk band was chasing a platinum record. Punk was about making music and getting it into people’s hands - that was the whole transaction.

No indie web builder is chasing Series A. We’re not optimizing for growth. We’re not selling your attention to advertisers. We charge a fair price for a real thing, if we even charge at all, and either way nobody’s pitching us to a boardroom.

Small. Sustainable. Answerable to no one but ourselves.

IV. THE ZINE NEVER DIED, IT JUST GOT A DOMAIN

Punk had zines - cut, pasted, photocopied, and passed hand to hand because the real press wouldn’t cover it. That’s blogging before anyone even called it blogging.

We still do that. A blog is a zine with better uptime. An RSS feed is a mailing list that never asks for your email. Webmentions are show flyers stapled to telephone poles all over town, pointing back to each other, building the scene a link at a time.

Community over audience. Nobody in this room is just watching.

V. MAKE WHAT YOU NEED, NOT WHAT “EVERYONE” NEEDS

Stop designing for some hypothetical user that doesn’t exist. Build the thing that scratches your itch. Use it yourself - eat your own dog food. If you’re not depending on it, why would anyone else?

Do this enough, in the open, sharing your code and your notes and your half-finished ideas posted for all to see, and the rest of the scene will pick it up. That’s how it spreads: not top-down, but kid to kid, site to site.

VI. WEIRD IS A FEATURE

GeoCities had hideous backgrounds, animated GIFs, and a MIDI file that played on page load. It was ugly, but it was also alive in a way no template can ever be.

We’re not going for pixel-perfect. We’re not A/B testing a homepage. Have fun, or what’s the point? Keep the web weird. Keep it handmade. Keep the mohawks.

VII. IT’S AN ALL-AGES SHOW

Punk wasn’t always right about this. Each scene had its bouncers at the door and idiots in the pit. Bands worth remembering spent half their set shouting them back out - Rock Against Racism, Riot Grrrl, the Dead Kennedys writing a song to tell the Nazi punks exactly where to go. That wasn’t a side project. It was a full-time job.

So… Everybody gets a seat on the Indieweb. No matter your color, faith, gender, who you love, how your brain is wired, what your body can do, how old you are, where you were born, or which language you write in. Nobody at this door is taking a ticket.

No degree, no job title, no follower count, no years of experience, no permission from others who were on the scene first.

And if you’re already inside, hold the door open for others. Link to the new kids. Answer beginner questions without snark. Write the alt text, caption the video, keep it keyboard-reachable. A site nobody can use is a club with stairs at the doors and no accessibility ramp.

All are welcome on the Indieweb. It’s not a code of conduct bolted on after the fact. It’s the entire reason we’ve built our own places on the Web to begin with.

VIII. THIS IS THE COUNTERCULTURE NOW

In the ’80s and ’90s, blasting Punk Rock was a way of telling the establishment where to stick it. Today, publishing on your own site instead of feeding the algorithm is the same middle finger, just a little quieter.

We opt out of the surveillance feed. We opt out of the engagement farm. We opt into a web made of small, stubborn, independent spaces that are loosely joined, built to last, and owned by those who make them.

We don’t need major platforms.

We have the Web, keyboards, tools, and community.

IndieWeb is Punk. Oi!

Thanks to @ayjay for putting me on.

💬 Neil Postman in Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change:

The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible. That is also why we must be suspicious of capitalists. Capitalists are by definition not only personal risk takers but, more to the point, cultural risk takers. The most creative and daring of them hope to exploit new technologies to the fullest, and do not much care what traditions are overthrown in the process or whether or not a culture is prepared to function without such traditions. Capitalists are, in a word, radicals. In America, our most significant radicals have always been capitalists—men like Bell, Edison, Ford, Carnegie, Sarnoff, Goldwyn. These men obliterated the 19th century, and created the 20th, which is why it is a mystery to me that capitalists are thought to be conservative. Perhaps it is because they are inclined to wear dark suits and grey ties. I trust you understand that in saying all this, I am making no argument for socialism. I say only that capitalists need to be carefully watched and disciplined. To be sure, they talk of family, marriage, piety, and honor but if allowed to exploit new technology to its fullest economic potential, they may undo the institutions that make such ideas possible.

💬 RE: My last post. This is the quote, among many others, that immediately confirmed I needed to purchase the book:

It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized by only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living. In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.

This second way of living in the world is recognized as illness in psychiatric terms. In some way or other our theory includes a belief that living creatively is a healthy state, and that compliance is a sick basis for life.

Seth Godin with a great, digestible critique of Amazon:

If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one. The ads make the search worse… When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place. Businesses continue to buy the ads—not because they’re dumb, but because the system has created a situation with few options.

💬 Frank Sinatra giving George Michael a dose of reality:

“I don’t understand a guy who lives “in hopes of reducing the strain of his celebrity status.” Here’s a kid who “wanted to be a pop star since I was about 7 years old.” And now that he’s a smash performer and songwriter at 27 he wants to quit doing what tons of gifted youngsters all over the world would shoot grandma for - just one crack at what he’s complaining about. Come on, George. Loosen up.”

As seen in a bar in Brooklyn.