Hidden Writings

Dan Sinker has a great blogpost I finally got to reading from last month, all about the need to help information get out.

I love the examples of how people got information out under fascism in the 30s and 40s. It's true, even with manuals for housewives and seed packets the most important information found ways to get out.

I think his closing few paragraphs are particularly powerful. We need to do more to take our work and our information to backups and places that are offline, or easily taken offline. Physical media and ways to spread it are important. Taking digital data and making it easily accessible offline is another area I've been thinking about a lot, including getting Archivebox working at home.

Independent, robust, new forms of media are essential. Even the best intentioned big media company may find it impossible to operate at full impact and strength. The future holds a big empty space for the type of journalism organizations that can go to paper, scatter, reassemble and preserve the data and stories the administration would prefer we forgot.

The rise of mass social platforms has been at the cost of a truly independent, truly open internet. But it's still there. You can still build anything on it, free of platforms and the overreach of monopolists and oligarchs.

It also means reacquainting ourselves with offline connections. We've built for scale for so long (in our software and in our focus on swelling our own follower counts) that we've forgotten the power of a handful of people around a table. It's time to stop chasing scale and start chasing the right people. Spread information table to table, person to person. 1:1 is everything right now.

And while we're talking offline, let's talk about making physical media again: music that can't be taken away with a keystroke, movies that don't involve a subscription, and news, writing, art and more that can be copied and printed and handed person-to-person—inside seed packets or not.

We have to become the media that has collapsed. Pick up the pieces and build anew. Build robust. Build independent.

Of course none of this is easy. These are not easy times. But it's necessary to make it through them. And while it may not be easy, it won't be lonely, because there are a lot of us out here looking to build anew. We'll do it, and we'll do it together.

Information wants to get out. Let's help it.