Web Wanderer #6: Neuroscientifically Nonsensical Microradios
Sustainable smartphones, old radio and killing 6 billion demons
From the mists of the deep past (three months ago), the shimmering tendrils reach out… Welcome back to the Web Wanderer, the allegedly weekly (sorry!) newsletter about the wonders of the Wild Web! This morning, I am bringing a roster including a nonsense machine, an online graphic novel and a wiki of the world’s most obscure nations. The Web Wanderer is an ongoing project to offer a guide to the mossy and overgrown hidden groves of cyberspace.
We begin today with an artist collective dreaming up the future from the middle of the ocean…
Merveilles
Merveilles is an online community that defies simple explanation. It is a loose collection of artists and technologists whose work and thinking combines playfulness, interdisciplinarity and a commitment to human-scale, durable, sustainable ways of building. The community was founded by a tiny artist collective called 100Rabbits, who operate from a sailboat in the Pacific. The main meeting places of Merveilles are a webring and a Mastodon server, where the group comes together to publish on topics such as off-grid living, game development, repairable technology and the artistic process. While joining the relatively reclusive community is invite-only, they tend to work with their virtual garage door open, making for a fascinating network to peek into, explore and learn from.
Towards Better Smartphones
As much as it is a necessity, the smartphone has become one of the most wasteful and hellish everyday technologies. It is marred by problems such as shady labor practices, planned obsolescence and privacy violations. However, a crop of new electronics producers are leading the way towards ethical, sustainable smartphones: the Dutch nonprofit Fairphone, the French company iodé and the German company SHIFT. They each have their different approaches, but with the same goal: repairable, durable smartphones that respect the privacy of buyers and the dignity of the humans that mine the materials and build the electronics. That may sound like a low bar, and it is, but by comparison to the wider smartphone market, it is distressingly pioneering. These manufacturers demonstrate that radically better ways of doing electronics are possible if we so choose; they are quite imperfect enterprises, but well worth looking into.
(I am not in any way sponsored by any of these companies. But feel free to send me money retroactively!)
How I Experience the Web Today
Though in this newsletter I seek to highlight the wonderful and the weird, a lot of the Web is a downright awful experience. Guangyi Li agrees, which is why he created the parodic website How I Experience the Web Today. For a schadenfreude-inducing journey into terrible design practices, do pay his hilarious website a visit.
Neuroscientifically Challenged
The human brain is a dazzling enigma, only deepened by the unbelievable junk science floating around. One force combatting this with trustworthy information is the educational website Neuroscientifically Challenged, created by neuroscientist and writer Marc Dingman. On the site, he disentangles the intricacies of the brain in an understandable, entertaining and scientifically sound way. He has both quick explainers (his 2-Minute Neuroscience series), as well as deeper dives on topics such as Alzheimer’s disease, synapses and Phantom Limbs.
Kill Six Billion Demons
Kill Six Billion Demons is a sprawling indie graphic novel that has been serialized on the Internet for about a decade, still ongoing. The story revolves around an unprepared heroine who becomes entangled in the machinations of gods forming the wildly complex mythology of the 777,777 worlds of the multiverse. The community formed around the comic is one of those corners of the Web that combines artsiness, geekdom and general good vibes into a rather wholesome atmosphere in which to discuss the wanton cruelty of the Demiurges.
David’s Website a.k.a. Nixiebunny.com
In a way, there is nothing at all that remarkable about nixiebunny.com. It is just the personal collection of miscellania of one David Forbes. And yet perhaps its idiosyncratic, unapologetic individuality is exactly what’s interesting about it, because David’s website makes no attempt whatever to attract an audience. Instead, glancing through it feels more akin to sifting through a quirky neighbour’s garage for buried treasures, such as his experiments with building a rubidium atomic clock, his archive of old vynil records or his salvaged ‘50s (?) informational film roll about the dangers of sniffing glue. I guess what I’m saying here is that personal websites are often great, and David’s is goddamn delightful.
The Nonsense Word Generator
To invent inexistent gibberish words that could nonetheless well exist in English and sound quite plausible, the place to go is the Nonsense Word Generator. It uses phonemes usually encountered in the English language to procedurally generate new words out of them. My latest try yielded such gems as jackloop and arsilly.
Maggie Appleton’s Digital Garden
Maggie Appleton is a self-described “designer, anthropologist and mediocre developer” who has a delightful personal website. It is a public place for her intimate thoughts, and there are thoughts well worth poking around for in her digital garden. Among many others, she writes about tools for thought, great books and the social fabric of the Web.
Micronations.wiki
The Micronations Wiki is the Internet’s premier encyclopedia on the subject of micronations, keeping track of the world’s many self-declared and unrecognized tiny countries. Some of these nations are hoaxes and jokes, some fictional, and some are very serious indeed. The website is a place to learn about the latest developments, such as the Republic of Onopolissia’s (near Sidney) new miniature funicular system, or the Republic of Heist-op-den-Berg’s (Belgian enclave) proposed split from Belgium to become a fiscal paradise.
Old Radio World
Old Radio World is a simple and cozy website, specializing in archiving recordings of old radio shows. It features series such as CBS Radio Mystery Theather, Flash Gordon and Abbott & Costello. The audio fiction (and nonfiction) of 70 years ago is still fascinating to listen to today, as much as for its content as for what it tells us about our cultural past.
Bird With A Machine Gun
Finally, to round out this week’s newsletter, I bring to the table as (usual) an offering most fluffy: a brave soldier, a defender, a legend. A bird with a tiny machine gun.
Thank you for reading the Web Wanderer for another week!
I hope this newsletter brought your brain to a pleasant sizzle! If you would like to see the project go on, spread it to fellow human creatures you think would enjoy it! Right now I'm doing a trial run of 15 consecutive weekly newsletters. Based on reception, I will decide whether to keep it going afterwards.
'Til next week!
The Web Wanderer logo is a remix based on art created by Luisa Brando, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 .