Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly — Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
Good morning,
Since March, I have been running a small club with Søren, Ana, Mads, and 150 of our friends. We call it Wildflowers Club. Until today it has been hidden from the public, but tomorrow we’ll open it for everyone, although it is primarily relevant if you live in Copenhagen.
I’m aware that many of you fall outside this category. So I promise that when I finally get around to publishing Codename URLPC, it won’t exclude anyone based on geography, just like it is primarily relevant for niche-internet appreciators.
With care,
Kristoffer
WILDFLOWERS CLUB
Wildflowers Club is a bouquet of recommendations for things to do in Copenhagen in the form of a newsletter. Each Sunday, we ask 150 people what they are looking forward to doing in the coming week and share all the collected recommendations in a free newsletter on Monday. It is an attempt to nurture an alternative space for celebrating local culture outside our personal feeds and global platforms. After three months in a closed circle, I’m happy to say it works, so now we are opening it to everyone.
ROADSIDE FLOWERS
Reconstructions is an infinite computer-generated poem.
Read it and weep features personal secrets and ten years of Internet trash.
A clear spring is a dear short story in the address bar and a Sunday Site.
FIELD NOTES: SPECIAL EDITION
An Email Appreciation Note
I love emails. So it is time to write an appreciation note for emails. For fifty years, people have been sending electronic mail to each other. This calls for applause, considering how many social platforms have appeared and disappeared. MySpace, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yo, Clubhouse… all came and left while people and spam bots continued to email each other. Today, around 300 billion emails are sent daily between four billion people.
My favourite aspect of email is how open the protocol is. You can read your emails on (almost) any device, and you can send emails to friends who use different email clients than yourself. It sounds silly to mention that a Gmail user can send an email to a Hotmail user, but it is, unfortunately, an uncommon practice on the internet. Imagine if it was easy for you to send a message from Discord to your grandmother’s Instagram account. Or from Twitter to Facebook.
And despite the format’s old age, it is flowering. Craig Mod is making pop-up newsletters for his long walks through Japan. Each walk, one newsletter. These days he is visiting Europe and documenting the journey in a daily, photos-only newsletter called Man, It’s Been a While. I wish my best friends would do the same on their trips. I also enjoy receiving Rest Notes, an email community network with rhythm made by Mark and Elliott. In Rest Notes, you send emails to everyone, but everyone individually decides with what frequency they want to receive incoming messages. In this way, Rest Notes is not a place for urgency — and this shows in the refreshing types of messages people send.
There are many other newsletters I’d like to recommend, and I have a lot of thoughts about email as a format. So please let me know if you’d like me to share fantastic newsletters and/or expand my thoughts on email as a medium and how I approach making Naive Weekly.
COLLECTIONS
I’m happy to receive submissions for collections at kristoffer@naiveweekly.com.
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly — Observations from the Internet Wilderness.
Thank you a million, billion, trillion, quadrillion to Shen and Magali for becoming paid subscribers. It’s always such a heartwarming feeling and I promise to put your money to use doing things on the Internet.
Last week this letter was sent to 1059 people. Thirty are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write. Logo by Studio Hollywood. Print by Luka. Postcard by me. Photograph by Ana Santl.