next unplatform workshop dates + programming updates

Hello all—ajazz here. If you’re reading this, it’s either (1) because you were subscribed to one of my several newsletters (either From The Superhighway, Down The Ladder, or Unplatform) (2) you attended one of my in-person events and expressed an interest in keeping up with future in-person events, or (3) you are one of the few real heads that checks my Neocities site every time it updates. Shoutouts to you.

Up top, I want to announce that I am consolidating the newsletters for all of my various projects into one central list. This is for several reasons (some of which I will get into later) but the main one is that I am now fortunate enough to have lots of people who want to keep up with my work, and I am tired of having to maintain a quintillion separate feeds and email threads to communicate with them all.

These blasts will not be on any regular schedule—I’ll just send out an update when I have something to share. Speaking of, here’s what I have to share:

Unplatform Creatives Workshop

For the last few months, I’ve been hosting an in-person event series called the Unplatform Creatives Workshop, where I bring creative professionals (and semi-professionals) together to brainstorm about how to build a creative practice outside of social media. These events have been very successful so far—not only has it helped immensely with building tech-critical political consciousness, but they have also already served as the launch pad for very promising new tech-critical organizing projects, some of which I hope to announce very soon.

In the meantime I’ve scheduled the next two in-person workshops:

1. The fifth workshop will be at the Brooklyn Public Library central branch on Sunday, May 10th, at 2pm.
2. The sixth workshop will be at 875 3rd Avenue on Thursday, May 28th, at 6:30pm.

I’m aware a lot of folks reading aren’t NYC based, and I definitely want to find ways to loop folks around the country and the world into these conversations. If you’re interested in participating in an online version of the workshop, or if you’re interested in hosting your own Unplatform workshop in your city, please reach out!

The Future of From The Superhighway

Most of you have noticed that From The Superhighway has been on an extremely long hiatus. This is, funnily enough, because I have been way too busy doing in-person tech-critical organizing to do my usual research-interview-compilation process. I might be one of the only people on earth right now who needs to spend less time offline.

I am still very invested in the indie web and its ecosystem, and I definitely want to get back into my usual rhythm of finding and showcasing cool shit I find on the frontier of the internet. With that said, what I’ve realized in the last few months is that the indie web is just one part of a much larger movement that is resisting (and reversing) the encroachments of Silicon Valley. I often find myself acting as a sort of ambassador for the indie web in the IRL organizing spaces that I’m in, and that’s because there still isn’t a lot of communication happening between the different branches of the larger “techno-humanist” movement. This has led me to the belief that FTS would be able to make a larger impact if it was a part of an all-encompassing techno-humanist media project instead of being its own thing. I want to create a place where the vast network of organizers that I’ve met in the last year to be exposed to the amazing things happening in the indie web, and vice versa.

The good news is that I have been building that place for the last few months, and it’s rapidly nearing completion. Stay tuned—I have a feeling you might hear something in the next two weeks.