A final plug for the 2025 Tiny Awards - voting closes on 1 September, so you have a week left to pick your favourite lovely little website from the past 12 months to win a VERY SMALL prize. Great webstuff made by real people, celebrate it while you still can: tinyawards.net/vote/

No Web Curios til 5 September, but if you would like some Excellent Internet to help you while away the afternoon then might I suggest you check out this year's Tiny Awards finalists if you've yet to do so? Eleven brilliant little websites for your consideration here: tinyawards.net/vote/

Like the starlets decades ago, today’s bedroom streamers have stars in their eyes. But dreams in the black mirror are not as close as they appear. zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/creator-ec...

What do 5,000 dreams about AI reveal about our relationship to it? Only in ZINE next week: open.substack.com/pub/kleinkle...

SCOTUS decision on age verification isn't just legal precedent, it's an artifact symbolizing our moment's anxiety about sexuality, paternalism and privacy online. These laws curb traffic to compliant sites and drive users to VPNs and noncompliant sites. zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/supreme-co...

Got home from the Apple Store with new AirPods and spotted dirt on the ear pieces. When I connect them, they connect as “Michael’s AirPods” with his Apple Care still going. Brought them back. Essentially: “Our b. Nothing to see here. Go home with these new new ones.” So that’s how Apple’s doing.

“Making for the web is easy, but most of us have forgotten how – ceding our digital agency to platforms and corporate landlords.” @kleinkleinklein.bsky.social + @sachajudd.com on building the Good Internet, out of the cozy web bits. Good stuff. zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/good-inter...

The Tiny Awards are back, and so am I! After a year off, I'll be a judge helping to decide "the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web" made in the last 12 months. Nominations open until the end of the month, submit anything you love! tinyawards.net

For the past few years, me, Kris at Naive and Matt at Reddit have been running the Tiny Awards, celebrating the good bits of the web. THEY ARE BACK IN 2025 AND NOMINATIONS ARE OPEN! Please tell your friends and share the link, as a small act of resistence to everything being shit: tinyawards.net

A spot on 2025 experience: Attempting to delete your 23andMe data as the company files for bankruptcy, preventing a new buyer from accessing your DNA, but the site keeps crashing. And this is the most interaction with the brand in 8 years as the experience was truly useless.

New working hyp: Employee tenure is not long enough to instill fiduciary duty on brand work. As a result, you get a lot of work chasing the trend because employees want to resonate for now, not build for decades. Brands require an Executive of Stewardship. Chief Legacy Officer.

Cultural-Singularity: When culture folds back in on itself amidst hyper-optimization and AI. The solution? Friction. zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/hyper-opti...

"The issue is just that “creativity” — especially online — is getting harder to surface and our platforms aren’t necessarily asking for it." zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/hyper-opti...

Bring back Vine, you cowards.

sur l'environnement médiatique qui change: lu et aimé zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/costco-guys

ZINE is read in 49 states (and 133 countries.) But I’m desperately seeking a reader from: Alaska. For the first Alaskan subscriber, I’m offering Founding Membership for life. If you know any peeps in Alaska interested in decoding social shifts, give ‘em a ping! ZINE.KleinKleinKlein.com

🍆 NSFW 💦 Pornhub's Year in Review Data Report could be one of the most insightful and overlooked glimpses into the collective psyche. If we're to better understand our moment, we've got to be curious, respectful and comfortable with the uncomfortable. The emerging trends:

TL;DR: Shrek is searched more frequently on Pornhub than Superman, Batgirl and Star Trek. zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/pornhub-tr...

I don’t understand how a +$1B global communications and business consulting org lays off +5% of its workforce two weeks before the holidays and still thinks they signal: “We know how to do good communications strategy.”

After a couple of weeks of extensively using Claude I’m increasingly concerned by the (inevitable) atrophying of our creative, critical and menial thinking. The thinking that feels like a weight rep.

I’m taking Qs, hot takes and curiosities via ZINE Office Hours (Substack Chat) over the next couple of days. Drop in and let’s chat… open.substack.com/chat/posts/f...

Creativity can't die. But metrics, fear of risk and poor discovery prevent the novel from seeing the light. This isn’t an issue of creativity, but an issue of permitting talent to graduate beyond the niche and accepting news mediums of creativity. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aToM...

Dear strategists, if you’re not an active participant in the culture, your frameworks won’t save you

"The easiest thing to get to conform is the technology... Understand the technology well enough to use it in a way that's compatible with you and your creative cycle, rather than trying to conform your humanity to it." - @rushkoff.bsky.social zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/douglas-ru...

People don’t love the “vibe” of a new platform as much as they love the flattening and equalizing of status and the ability to start from scratch.

Posting the same short message on X, Threads, Blue Sky and Substack Notes to ensure max coverage and ultimately determine which platform to one day invest heavily in based upon growth and engagement, is not what anyone of us signed up for and it’s okay to refuse to partake in this ridiculous game.

I’d like to propose… Klein’s Law: The Internet is actually smaller than we think — the more networked we become, the easier it is to come across conversations about yourself and others, and therefore we should always be respectful. Presume the person you’re talking about will discover that content.