🔗 /ᴅɪʀ

The idea of a directory might cause flashbacks to an earlier internet for those around to experience it. The manual composition of an index of websites became quaint with the advent of the eternally crawling search engine (and now, the LLM). But with the degradation of the platform-based internet, characterized by the insertion of surveillant & rent-seeking design patterns at every possible turn, it's easy to long for a more handmade, more human online experience.

What’s the value of a directory if search engines & LLMs have exhaustively mapped and ingested the internet? Well, we have become exhausted with exhaustiveness. In an information-saturated environment, scope emerges as the antidote. Ethical scope, aesthetic scope — these only become possible when taking a point of view, which means excluding things that don’t pertain to (or that violate) the scope.

Scenes and movements are not possible without scope. Whether geographic, aesthetic, political, etc., a scene or movement exists only because it has integrity, a membrane through which things are admitted or not admitted. The membrane can be negotiated at the edges, but the meaning of being in a scene or part of a movement evaporates once the scope becomes too relaxed.

/ᴅɪʀ is offered as both a discovery tool and a scope, indicating what we might want to nurture or build. Whether decades old or still nascent, these projects represent proofs-of-concept, blueprints, causes for hope. They are collectively owned, or community supported, or explicitly noncommercial. Corporate ownership and extractive business models are disqualifying criteria.

I will be adding to it over time, and welcome any submissions.