Tiny Rebellions is an irregular newsletter written by Milly Schmidt. When I’m not reading, I’m working as a design manager at Atlassian, based in Melbourne, Australia.
I have been making things on the internet since the early 2000’s. I’ve always been interested in reading, writing, photography, design, art, music and cinema, and I find a lot of happiness in connecting with people through shared experiences of things that make us feel things.
Like many people, I’m wondering what my life is going to look like as the internet crumbles away underneath me. As I log off various platforms for good, I’m finding myself more and more curious about how to bring joy and connection into my life without it.
This newsletter is titled “Tiny Rebellions” after a phrase in an article I read that described every choice you make for yourself about what you listen to, read, watch or otherwise consume as a tiny act of rebellion against a world where algorithms increasingly recommend for us.
I am writing about those choices that I make, so you might learn about something you like here and participate in your own kind of tiny rebellion against algorithmic curation.
I started writing short book reviews on my Instagram account in 2021. Faced with a shift to video, an increasing focus on clickbait and algorithmic curation, I felt like I should read more, and the reviews were a gentle attempt to push back against what the platform wanted me to become.
They morphed over the years, getting longer, weirder and more divergent, reading less and less like reviews. More unhinged. Ungovernable.
I moved off Instagram at the start of 2025 after Meta abandoned fact-checking, DEI and generally making anything that would be nice to use. I started aggressively unsubscribing from anything that was pushing algorithmically curated content into my eyeballs and decided to go all in on human-curated work. Playlists made by people. Reviews written by people. Recommendations from people.
This newsletter is my attempt to return to human-curated recommendations. Unfortunately, the human curating is me, so your mileage my vary.
Tiny Rebellions