I remember this website. The first tweet I ever posted was a link to this page. Back then, it was a beautiful techno-art web project that excited a college music student. A bunch of strangers on the internet collaborating around a single key.
Now, it’s a reminder of what the Internet used to be. An old signpost of a forgotten place. A cozy place. A place without cookie banners or AI-generated SEO articles or five million websites with the same design aesthetic asking me to sign up for their newsletter. It wasn’t optimized. It wasn’t capitalized. It was small. It was beautiful.
Then it got big. Like most good things. And in its growth, it lost something.
E.F Schumacher, author of “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered,” wrote about the insatiable appetite for scale in the West. He saw this happening in the mid-20th century industrial era: a ravenous consumption of fossil fuels for economic progress, the dehumanization of work through endless abstraction, a loss of community and accountability through a neverending pursuit of bigness.
I’ve seen this pseudo-philosophical economic credo of growth-as-the-zenith etch its way into my own life: a constant moving to bigger cities from my rural upbringing; an interest in technology and leverage for broader impact; a burning desire to climb the proverbial corporate ladder—to sit at the top of something, anything; a seeking to resonate with a faceless mass that I can’t touch or feel or comprehend.
Despite believing small is beautiful, it takes a constant reminder to myself to embrace this ethos: to do less, to keep it simple, to be patient, and to invest in the little things around me at the expense of abstracted, bigger things. To not outsource the work I love for the sake of making something larger, richer, or more impactful.
The administrative pain of my life always seems to be inflicted by bigness: a complicated tax code I’ll never understand, a health insurance card issued by a mega-corporation that doesn't work at my local pharmacies, and an endless stoking of outrage from the global feeds of techno-capital.
Amidst all of this bigness, I take a breath. I share a cup of coffee with my girlfriend. I go to inbflat.net and enjoy a quiet moment of creativity. Because as much as the world around me is preaching for growth, small is beautiful.