A website is an act of demanding space for yourself and the people you love and constantly tending that space. It's a way of naming: to take on a URL and courageously ask to be witnessed, visited. I understand certain sites that I frequent as continuous labors of love, whether they're directed to a specific person or something broader. I see making websites and making in general as nothing more than a way of asking to be loved.

https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/why-arent-there-more-websites-about

https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/back-to-the-corecore

https://love-letters-to-places-ill-never-meet.glitch.me/

"escape the algorithm" over a grid with a bunch of eyeballs pointing away. a mouse hovers on top with the label "elan ullendorff". to the right, the text: a newsletter abotu taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet"

That reminds me of rituals again. What is the bread or the website as an artifact or a screenshot in the Wayback Machine alone? A website is not that. It’s not just a package of code, it’s a place where people gathered, it’s a place that was referenced by a network of other sites before its links rotted away. It was once a place where there was life. And when we pass down the ritual of gathering, that's a truer form of preserving. We can't expect for a piece of bread or the site to last forever. But the act of feeding and living onwards will continue to be the most important thing about it.

Web search promised to resolve questions. Instead, it's brought on a soft apocalypse of a truth that's reduced to trivia.

Google's Answer Box Changed the Meaning of Information

https://www.wired.com/story/google-answer-box-information-search/

Escape prompt

Strategies for redirecting attention

WETHINKALONE

Find an email in your archives that conforms to one of the following themes:
• An Email With I Love You In It
• An Email About The Body
• An Email That Gives Advice

Tell me what you found! Reply, comment, or forward an email to hi@elan.place: I may feature it in a future post.

https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/the-email-archivist

new here, guess i’ll post some treasures from deep sea diving on the internet

good morning, more vibes from the depths of the internet (pt. 3)

“I see making websites and making in general as nothing more than a way of asking to be loved.”

from my conversation with @chia

https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/why-arent-there-more-websites-about

i wrote about a strange instagram account documenting a particular subculture/aesthetic of 2000s myspace

https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/back-to-the-corecore

i made a website that tells the story of how people found the website

🔗 howdidyoufind.me

this page is intended to be useful 

(treasure #2 from deep sea diving on the internet)

I’m building the syllabus for my Escape the Algorithm course at Penn in the fall.

What are the best things you’ve read/heard/watched about how platform algorithms are shaped by / shape culture,  or interesting attempts to take control over/subvert those algorithms?

to get to know my new neighborhood, i paid a data broker $5 for a csv of local closed businesses, cross referenced with Google Maps listings, and created an interactive map using past reviews. a digital seance, if you will

https://love-letters-to-places-ill-never-meet.glitch.me/

my newsletter abt reclaiming attention from the internet has a new name/look! escapethealgorithm.substack.com

subscribe for things like:
🤖 anti-productive uses of AI
🏡 meditations on zillow's man caves
🤓 interviews with subversive internet ppl
🌳 prompts for wandering the web

“[A website] is not just a package of code, it’s a place where people gathered… it was once a place where there was 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦. And when we pass down the ritual of gathering, that’s a truer form of preserving.”  
- from my conversation with @chia 

https://tinyurl.com/chiapart2

In my first piece for WIRED's new software criticism column, I wrote about Google’s relentless pursuit of answering our questions and whether having our questions answered is what we really need.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-answer-box-information-search/

today’s escape the algorithm is a tribute to Miranda July’s experimental email newsletter on its 10 year anniversary

it also includes a prompt to try it out yourself: comment or forward what you find to hi@elan.place

https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/the-email-archivist

spoke on my practice around love, websites, and folk archival (and all of webmaking as a love language challenging the hostile web) w the lovely @at_elan for 'escape the algorithm'

𓆝.° ｡˚𓆛˚｡ °.𓆞 ·˙
https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/why-arent-there-more-websites-about

Posts