Hello netizens! If you're receiving this email you likely signed up to our netizen.org newsletter after attending one of our events, maybe D.R .E.A.M. (Data Rules Everything Around Me)? maybe BrowserFest? maybe Bias Out of the Box? maybe our Chicago Internet Walking Tour? In any case, it's been a while, and we’re excited to be in your inbox!

Is the Internet broken? (Or did someone break it?) A recent BBC Ideas episode remembers a Web that was once “decentralized and full of weird corners,” like a messy box of Lego bricks anyone could build with. Then social media changed the terms. Platforms run by surveillance capitalists began watching our behavior and feeding it to engagement algorithms: machine-learning systems that predict what will keep us hooked (often whatever triggers or divides us). Convenient? Sure. Free? Not exactly. Cory Doctorow has a word for where this leads: “enshittification.”

But the Internet isn’t finished. It’s something we make. What if we reclaimed it from platforms that treat our lives as data and our attention as profit? What if we restored the Web’s ethos as an open, participatory space where anyone can learn, play, experiment, and create?

In that spirit, we’re excited to announce the first public release of netnet.studio: our free and open-source, browser-based hypermedia makerspace for creating not just on the Web, but with it.

Meet netnet ◕ ◞ ◕ the AI-TA at the center of the studio. Don't worry, it's not that kind of AI. No neural networks, no data scraping, no GPUs; netnet is a classical, hand-crafted teaching assistant that helps guide you through the studio which is both an educational platform and an online creative coding playground for fully realizing the Web’s creative potential!

netnet.studio was built by netizens Nick Briz and Sarah Rooney, inspired by the many ways creative folks have engaged with the Web as a medium for self-expression, like the net.art movement of the 1990s and the IndieWeb scene of today, netnet’s mission is to guide creatives in the journey from code-curious beginners to creative coding virtuosos through interactive learning and experimental play with the medium itself.

Nick and Sarah have been working on netnet.studio for 6 years, throughout that time it's been beta-tested by hundreds of students and professors around the world, from large web design classrooms (like at the University of Waterloo Canada, read a testimonial here) to artist-led summer programs (like NØ SCHOOL NEVERS in France.

And now you can use it too! Build a fan page. Mark up a poem. Sketch an interactive artwork. Netnet will be right there, hyped to help you understand the code, untangle the bugs, and explore what is possible. 

Visit https://netnet.studio to get started! We'll be sharing larger netnet updates via this newsletter on a monthly-ish basis and you can follow netnet on 🦋 BlueSky for more regular updates. Nick will also be posting tutorials and walkthroughs on 📺 YouTube over the coming months (subscribe there to follow along).

"Netnet isn’t made by Apple or Adobe. There's no product-manager-and-focus-group provenance, no features sanded down until all the personality is gone. It’s open source, built by a small team of educators and designers who care about the craft of web design and the pedagogy of teaching the internet as something that is open, free, and hands-on. [...] my students arrive with almost no exposure to what open source is. Netnet gives me a way into that conversation about how not all software is rent-seeking and that there are software relationships where the user is not a consumer."

— Greg J. Smith
(editor for HOLO and an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo)

"Our digital future is either one in which we face more extraction or where we have more self-determination. If it's built for extraction, other people will build things that we can't imagine that will torment and immiserate us. And if we have more self-determination, we will build things that we can't imagine that will excite and delight us. The difference isn't whether everything will be great always. The difference is that when it's bad, if we're in charge, we'll get to change it."

— Cory Doctorow

A project like this takes considerable time, money and effort, and while we've received helpful grants from organizations like the Clinic For Open Source Arts to get us to this point, we now need your support to keep this project alive and freely accessible to everyone. If you can, please consider joining our 💸 Patreon where supporters get access to early features and community chat ($5/mo), voting in feature prioritization polls ($15/mo), monthly "office hours" QA live streams with the creators ($35/mo) and other behind-the-scenes content.

If you're an educator interested in incorporating netnet into your curriculum checkout the Institutional Support Page to learn how your institution can help sponsor us as well, reach out to [email protected] to learn more.

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│ ◕ ◞ ◕ │ netnet.studio
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netizen.org propels curious citizens of the ‘net beyond problematic defaults towards a more creative, playful, and equitable digital world. We are a collective of new media artists, educators and activists on a mission to reestablish human agency in the information age through public lectures, workshops, digital tools, online events and festivals.