THE
HARD
COPY
How It Works
Get a hard copy of everything you're interested in reading online—every month, or week, or every other month, or every other week! We'll keep an eye on your subscriptions and compile them into a book that we'll mail to you at the end of the month.
Whether it's your favorite substack, independent writer, or your saved backlog of articles, we'll get the content to you in one of the oldest information mediums in human history: the physical book. Our service is designed to bring the digital world into your hands in a tangible, timeless, and passive format.
When you sign up, you'll choose your preferred delivery frequency, enter your subscriptions, and pay about $10-20, depending on the number of your subscriptions. Every time a subscription posts something, we'll add it your book, and at the end of the month or week, it will be printed, bound, and delivered to your doorstep.
Why?
The internet is one of the most potent technologies ever created. Partially this is the great interconnectedness it provides, so that almost everyone can find not just valuable information, but something like community, at least in appearance. The drawback, of course, is: you have to use the internet and the internet sucks. Many are left with the unfortunate "aftervibe" peculiar to the internet. A hungriness or "twitchiness" for more content (read: dopamine), a depersonalization from your own body and environment, a difficulty focusing on the next task at hand and connecting with others face-to-face, general discontent with your immediate life -- many more could be listed, but in short: despite the fact that you're no longer actively using the internet, you are still online. The spirit of the internet is still there, the patterns of machine logic have been worn into the grooves of our latent thought.
The number of critiques talking about why the internet sucks are numerous (reach out below if you'd like some recommendations), and there are woefully few explorations of alternate ways of being with the internet. Just describing this sort of exploration is difficult. I'm unconvinced it is possible to mentally grasp a way out of the maze of modernity without first stumbling out of it in your own life and soul, but entirely cutting out the internet simply isn't feasible for many people, much less desirable.
This is why I've been working on The Hard Copy, both as an exploration of alternative cultural ecologies (hopefully nothing as democratic as a mere lifestyle), and as a support beam of the The Good Life's bulwark against the encroaching enclosure of our psyches. The inception of this project was for me. The expansion has been in the hope of something more.