Exilic design
exilic design [is] the act of knowingly building within the Para-Real… protecting our own memory through deliberate fragility.
(Emphasis mine)
the exilic are venueless. Their participants know the server won’t be there tomorrow. They treat the right to disappear, distort, and misremember as sacred, or at least, as inevitable. They document on their own terms, with their own tools, and preserve through adaptation. They recalibrate after loss, borrowing from sneakernet traditions for out-of-band transfer and redeployment. Because they do not fall for Barlow’s myth of the independence of cyberspace, they are deeply Para-Real: they know that their home of mind will never be separated from the real.
The tension between the open web and the cozyweb/darkforest is just one of many tensions along different axes in our digital lives: scale, convenience, cost, etc. This conversation has been going on for decades (as captured by NDC evoking John Perry Barlow) and swings back and forth (as seen in this previous reaction against the Dark Forest). I am glad there are folks trying to forge new language and a new aesthetic of resistance out there.