No Music Policy
The text that follows is the script from a talk I gave about The Thursday Night Show (TTNS) and ALTc Radio, at the University of Oxford and live online on TTNS on April 29th 2026. I’ve included a video from recordings of the talk and broken it up into two parts, to tell the different stories in their own space.
Between the two topics, we held an engaging audience discussion around the question ‘If you had your own radio show (music, talk, or a combination of the two), what would it be about, be called or sound like?’ This was not broadcast and so has been kept out of the recordings.
By the end of the talk, I started running out of time, and so didn’t get to present the entire script to the audience. This post includes the full story as written, despite slight convergence from the latter part of the second video.
Firstly, I’d like to thank the university (and particularly Emma) for the invitation to come here and tell this story. I’d also like to thank you in the room for choosing to come and listen to it, and those listening online for giving us their attention today. I hope that you might hear something in my story that you could apply to your own practice and that The Thursday Night Show might gain a listener or two as a result.
The story I’m going to talk about today is one about a community. It’s a community that first came together online and flourished there, long before many of us found company in each other’s physical presence. An Internet gang, if you like. I’ll begin, however, with a party.
Four Days in a Field
Summer 2022 and we all needed to take a little time out from the virus and its lockdowns, the war, and the ongoing economic crises everywhere. We also had an anniversary that needed celebrating, as well as the passing of one of our own that needed commemorating. The anniversary marked ten years of eccentric, eclectic Internet radio with The Thursday Night Show, all night, every Thursday for a decade. To our minds at least, the most eclectic radio station on the Internet.
I arrived on site with VoiceOfDoom and VJFromHell on the Wednesday, all of us still trying to get those quarantine feelings out from under our fingernails. Digit3 and crew had already put up the marquee, built a stage and put a rig together on it. Next to the tent, DJ Gadget was ready with what we needed to take sound and vision from the stage to the Web, including via a great big 5G mast.
I soon realised that the event would benefit from a site manager, so I took on the role of keeping things organised and sticking to time. In my day job at a London university, I’d long been used to working with academics and others where the teachers and learners might be distributed in a variety of configurations across in-person and online modes of participation. This would be a very different kind of multimodal challenge.
We’d hired a whole campsite for the event, so it was off bounds for the general public and until we packed it with performers and their nearest or dearest, a pretty wide-open space. TTNS10 would therefore become the first hybrid festival I’d ever attended, where the performers were all together on site and the non-performing audience were all elsewhere, online and offsite but also connected to the event and to each other, via the radio feed and the chatroom.
Before the main proceedings kicked off, we gathered together in the marquee in memory of Ol’ Father Shine, who had passed away between the emergence of the virus and the implementation of the first lockdown. We scattered what remained of his ashes over the marquee’s grass dancefloor while archives of his shows played out on site and over the radio feed.
Thursday was the day of the birthday itself. Jan Travell kicked off, phoning in her breakfast show live from a baking balcony in Southern France. Doom and Flowers did a bass and drums playalong on the grass to some jazz standards. I did a dub set, inadvertently inventing dub yoga out in the tent along the way. Danny M had lent the event his bass bins and you could feel that bass deep down in your soul through those bins.
It was a baking hot day, feeling like bush heat. I started relaxing in ways I hadn’t done for a long time and took a few grass massages while others were shadebathing in the footprint of the large conifers nearby.
The music continued with a Patrons Night set, followed by some afternoon chilled beats from Chipko and Shuttergirl. DannyM played a set before heading off to become the site’s pizza chef. Dunavibe, A.Nu.Revolution and Ian Joliet oversaw the transition from afternoon to evening. I put on some classic funk and soul tunes, while VoiceOfDoom followed later with a Dadstep set, playing the genre that had been invented on TTNS.
The tent then became a club as the lights, lasers and smoke machine came out for a Digit3 set, with Gadget playing into the smaller hours. Bookending the remote shows, Sister LoFi phoned his lashings of house music in live from Kentucky.
With the birthday itself over but two more days of festival yet to go, we marked the transition point by live streaming the dawn chorus from the nearby forest out over the web in full spatial audio.
A bunch of friends, many meeting each other for the first time, had put on an event with next-to-no budget that would have cost 100s of 1,000s of pounds to organise otherwise. Everyone had played to their strengths and brought what they could to make a greater whole.
Origin Story
My good friend Dom Robinson is a Streaming Media Consultant and serial entrepreneur. He was the person that put both Glastonbury Festival and the UK’s Prime Minister’s Question Time live on the Web for the first time. I’ve learned more about the Internet from him than from anyone else.
Back in the summer of 2012, Dom put out a post on his Facebook page about mixing some jungle tunes together on an iPad and finding a way to share a live feed of the mix to the Web. Buried in the post’s comments, he suggested that he was thinking about a regular Thursday night thing and that there was probably a way to pass the baton to others to act as DJ handovers.
I was curious about the prospect of doing radio again. I’d not really done any broadcasting myself since my brief stint on a graveyard shift on college radio at the University of South Florida back in 1994. I would undoubtedly be rather rusty, but it wouldn’t take too long to pick the habit back up again.
A little over two weeks later and with a test broadcast under our belts, we had a debut Thursday Night Show on the air. I opened with a two-hour set playing as D1 Radio, Dom followed as D2 Radio (later to be known as VoiceOfDoom), and a friend of his went next as HarviB. TTNS’s first broadcast concluded with a set from two guys known as BassShack. Dane from BassShack (later known on TTNS as Digit3) founded SharpStream, now a leading provider of audio streaming software.
We put together a rudimentary website that included the audio feed, a public chatroom and what we called the canvas, which was a prominent part of the site we’d use for displaying photographs, artwork or video. This would mean that we’d have things to look at while we were listening and the website would function as ‘the bar’ for any other listeners that happened to join us.
Having all reached the stages of our lives where we were starting families, careers or businesses that demanded our attention, it was no longer as easy to find ourselves going out to the clubs in Brighton of an evening. We therefore ended up going out by staying in.
Radio Caroline had needed a ship moored in international waters to be able to broadcast some musical alternative to the aural gruel once served up to British ears. TTNS deployed a Shoutcast server instead, and we didn’t even need to hoist a Jolly Rodger to reach a whole lot of ears ourselves. Dom sorted out licensing, meaning that we were not just a pirate station online.
Following the launch of TTNS, we set about finding some others to join us at the virtual bar who would serve up some listening delights themselves. Early additions that year included David deVynel, fresh from London’s Eccentric Club, Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer, and Ol’ Father Shine, an Irish tradesman who Dom had met when Shine was on a plastering job.
What we now call the crew started to build out from there. The club membership fee for joining the crew was committing to playing your own show on TTNS. We didn’t care what music you wanted to play, or even if you weren’t playing music at all, but we’d give you a slot of airtime to fill in a way that you saw fit. After all, the only music policy was that there was no music policy — just bring your jam.
TTNS became a platform for a group of friends to play music to each other. The crew thus became the inner circle. Over 80 DJs have played on air with us since 2012, and we currently have an active roster of 40 DJs. The current roster play out from the UK, France, the United States and Mexico, although we’ve hosted broadcasts from several other countries too.
In 2013, we gained a patron. Herbie Flowers was probably one of Britain’s most prolific session musicians, having played bass on an estimated 500 hit recordings by the end of the 1970s alone. You’ll probably know him best from the bassline he provided to Lou Reed’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’.
Dom convinced Herbie to add his name to TTNS as Patron and, in return, we’d put on some radio broadcasts featuring him and many of his friends. For our first Patron’s Night show, Dom was supposed to handle the technicals, and I was set to be the primary host. However, in a rare life moment, I was hospitalised that week. I ended up stuck on my back in a Brighton ward listening over 4G to an amazing radio show that I was supposed to be hosting!
There is also an outer circle to TTNS and that is the wider listenership. Because TTNS is free to listen to on the Web, our bar counter is open to the world too. It’s quite difficult to track listeners of Internet radio, particularly when the feed is accessible via multiple routes, but as even just hits on the website suggest, we seem to have a global listenership.
Sometimes, people move from becoming a listener to becoming a DJ, as with now mainstays like Hardy Milts. Hardy discovered us through Mr B’s shows and ended up joining the crew in 2015. He has since become the defacto ‘bartender’ at TTNS and often plays a role in helping onboard any newbies.
Although we’re focused more on the community than on the wider listenership, we always try and bear that ‘extended circle’ in mind. With radio, you never know who might be listening.
Milestone Events
Having a virtual club where guests hang out every week in each other’s company is all well and good, but sometimes you just need to get together in real life to consolidate and nurture that community. That can be particularly tricky when you don’t all live nearby each other, so you have to make an event of it. Because the nucleus of the station has always been Brighton, this is where the TTNS IRL events really began.
For the first one, we combined the station’s first birthday with Doom’s 40th and took over part of Brighton’s North Laine pub. deVynel hosted, while Shine, Doom, Digit3, and myself all played sets live from the pub and our remote DJs filled in the gaps in the schedule. The centrepiece was live performances from Professor Elemental and Mr B, the two leading exponents of chap hop.
Having always favoured live shows over prerecorded ones. Patron’s Night became a great opportunity to get some actual musicians together for a live broadcast. Highlight shows included taking Italian electroswing pioneer Rosantique over to Herbie’s bothy studio and a night live from Brighton’s Hobgoblin Music shop, with walls full of the greatest array of stringed instruments I’d ever seen together in one place.
Brighton’s drone enthusiast community provided another source of IRL events, alongside the ‘Let’s Drone Out’ chat show that debuted on TTNS. Mr B and I both did live sets from Rottingdean’s Mini Airshow event in 2015, from a broadcast setup at the edge of the drone racing courses.
Then, in 2016, we held our 4th birthday at Hidden Valley, in a disused barn in rolling Sussex farmland. Digit3 and crew built a pallet stage and decorated the barn, while others pitched tents or parked camper vans. Drone flying was included as one of the activities for the day and we broadcast live from early afternoon and into the evening.
In 2017, I took over the scheduling of DJs, bringing a regular rhythm to programming and a focus on nurturing the DJ roster. For our 5th birthday that summer, we managed to showcase as much of that roster as we possibly could, with an evening where the baton passed between 17 different DJs.
We also introduced a new system that would enable us to put together programmes of pre-recorded sets from the archives to keep the music flowing when it wasn’t a Thursday Night. We could now broadcast shows 24/7, which took us further down the road towards feeling like a proper radio station. Kudos to Grins for handling this these days.
The following year, TTNS was given our own tent at one of Sussex’s leading family festivals, Elderflower Fields. This would be the biggest IRL event yet and meant a significant scaling up of operations. We put together four days of programming that included both live acts and DJs.
I’d never achieved my youthful ambition of playing at Glastonbury, so this was about as close as I was going to get. It was also an opportunity for many of the DJs that had come on board over the preceding few years to meet each in person for the first time.
We have long aimed to trace a Thursday night around the globe as part of our weekly operations. Once a week, it is always a Thursday night somewhere or other, and we aim to one day be the soundtrack to Thursday nights everywhere.
Practically speaking, this would mean dividing the world up into four main show zones and finding enough consistent and reliable DJs in each zone. While this remains the long-term ambition, we at least managed to trial such an idea during that first summer of Covid.
The first live multinational multi-satellite television production took place in 1967 and was called ‘Our World’. National broadcasters from fourteen different countries as well as the European Broadcasting Union participated in the two-hour event, which was shown on TV that summer in 24 countries.
This technological milestone in television broadcasting had an estimated audience of between 400 and 700 million people. It is best remembered in the UK for the participation of The Beatles, who were filmed performing their new song ‘All You Need Is Love’ for the first time.
While the TTNS 8th birthday event had nothing like the technical degree of coordination as ‘Our World’ (never mind the audience), we planned something that followed in the slipstream of what our broadcast predecessor had made possible. This became 20 hours of live music from around the world that traced a Thursday night and spanned from New Zealand to California. We needed a lot more than just love to pull something like this off!
A memorable post-Covid outside broadcast event was a 2022 live show in Brighton, held in an old church and with an act called the New Note Orchestra. The orchestra was organised in a circle and in the centre, DJ Gadget placed a 360 camera and spatial audio microphone, both rigged up to a 5G mast placed outside the church. It would be the first TTNS broadcast with fully immersive sound and vision, where listeners or viewers could experience the performance live as if sat in the middle of the circle.
Not all TTNS events happen IRL though. For the 11th birthday, we introduced a DJ challenge and tasked each act with taking on a set themed around the lines on the London Underground. We used songs about stations where different lines intersected as transition tracks between sets, and each DJ was careful to mind the gap on a handover.
Online Communities
In 1993, the same year that Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web available to the general public and when I was a DJ on a student radio station at the University of Sussex, American writer Howard Rheingold released a book called ‘The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier’.
Rheingold wrote about how — for a couple of hours a day — he would plug a computer into his home telephone line and make contact with other people from around the world via a computer conferencing system known as the WELL.
Writing long before this thing we now call social media came into being, he described all the things that people in virtual communities could do but, in doing so, they would leave their physical bodies behind. ‘You can’t kiss anybody and nobody can punch you in the nose’, he stated ‘but a lot can happen within those boundaries.’
While Rheingold was enthusiastic about the liberating potential of computer-mediated communications, he was also mindful of the pitfalls of mixing technology and human relationships. He presciently observed that:
The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost…But…this latent technical power must be used intelligently and deliberately by an informed population.
He also noted that what he termed as ‘big power and big money’ would always find a way to control access to virtual communities, so it was important for people to learn about how to use this technology while they still had the freedom to do so. Sounds very familiar today.
A brief detour by way of a workplace story.
In the summer of 2020, back before the Covid vaccines were authorised for public use, my university realised that we would need to run the coming academic year mostly all online again. Teaching and learning activities would therefore need to be rethought.
The university developed a set of overarching principles for the coming year, and the Digital Education team I’m part of hastily bootstrapped a rudimentary guide to learning design for online teaching. We also put together a Microsoft Teams site as a forum for staff to get answers to quick queries around online teaching and for the sharing of good practice and ideas.
I encouraged a colleague of mine to run this proto community, which gave teaching staff both synchronous and asynchronous modes of interaction. The lessons I’d learned from trying to keep the community of TTNS DJs involved and engaged over the years came in very handy.
We provided multiple modes for interaction yet tried to keep things simple. We looked to ensure that live activity had a regular rhythm to it, so that the audience could depend on the platform. We devolved agency to our users and encouraged them to feel ownership of the space. And we tried to make sure that the Learning and Teaching Community was not just somewhere helpful, but that it would also be ‘sticky’, ie somewhere that people would want to be.
Today, the community is not only still going, but is thriving, with over 500 members, a rich diversity of topics across multiple channels, and great attendance at many of the live events we host there.
Before I turn to you in the room for a brief discussion activity, let’s hear a little from some of the TTNS DJs about what the station means to them and why it matters.
AdamC:
The range of DJs and the complete lack of judgement in the incredible, welcoming chat room is what got me to firstly stay, then engage in chat (having never engaged in any other social media), and finally pluck up the courage to share my own random taste in music. The feedback from clearly knowledgeable and unjudgemental listeners is really appreciated and makes me come back again and again.
MarkC (who’d wanted to be a radio DJ since a childhood):
…what’s kept me here and really removed any barriers I might have encountered was how supportive and non-judgemental…the community is here. It’s a fun place to hang out, no-one gives you a hard time if there’s a technical thing that goes wrong, in fact the opposite — everyone jumps in with examples of how they’ve screwed up or reassurances that it doesn’t matter.
A.Nu.Revolution:
I owe so much of my diverse music interests to TTNS, as well as my radio presentation skills…And then there’s the TTNS chatroom. I say this when advertising my shows on TTNS: “Come for the music, stay for the people.” Because I did…In this age where so much depends on optics, I love the chatroom for allowing me to get to know truly interesting people based on what they say and play, not how they look.
DJ SOMOS:
I’m new to TTNS, and even so, I have felt welcomed and supported not only as a fellow DJ but also as a familiar friend. Being a part of TTNS I feel supported, cheered on and accompanied in my journey as a TTNS DJ…I also feel connected with everyone in the sense that we enjoy and support all genres of music and have interconnected tastes and styles…TTNS feels like a family of friends who also happen to love music.
Brian Borden:
TTNS to me is a platform inviting artists/DJs to express their art. This means FREEDOM. It is not commercial radio. It reminds me of College radio — the only radio in airwaves that is NOT controlled by record companies that are Major or just Major in being thieves. Let’s keep it real.
The Party at the Pandemic
Let’s go back to the first Covid lockdown. Spring 2020. Like many people, my professional and social life had temporarily contracted to take place almost wholly on landscape-oriented rectangular screens in my living room.
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By law, nobody could leave their homes to socialise with each other in the places that they typically would do so in. This led to a surge in interest for online spaces where community was possible and already gathering. New DJ Ian Joliet joined us to run his Social Distancing Dance Parties (SDDP) on a Saturday night.
TTNS started seeing some unexpectedly big audience spikes too and a nightclub in a browser was born. We added a Zoom feature to the website, creating what was my first experience of a distributed dancefloor. Our visitors started dressing up for a night in, and to dance, alone together.
By day, I was a frontline Educational Technologist in my living room, playing my part with helping my institution continue to function during the biggest professional crisis any of us had faced in living memory.
By night, I was running a sudden hit online nightclub as people around the world who could no longer leave their homes found themselves roaming around online and settling on TTNS as one of the releases from the pressures of the bizarre circumstances that we all found ourselves in.
The Association for Learning Technology (or ALT, for short) is the UK’s leading professional membership body for learning technologists like myself. ALT were one of the organisations that others turned to for advice on how to run participative and engaging conferences online.
They naturally couldn’t run their annual flagship in-person conference (ALTc) that year either, so they put together an online Summer Summit instead. This would allow us learning technologists to gather together, share stories and let off steam, now that the ‘pivot to online’ had forced many of our institutions to finally understand the work that we did.
As I sat in my house alone, I pondered the two online communities that I engaged with and socialised amongst — TTNS and ALT. ‘Can I somehow bring the two of these together?’ I asked myself.
What I’d seen working with TTNS could surely apply in professional contexts too, albeit in different ways. After all, one of the questions that many of us were struggling with at the time was how to encourage engagement in fully online (educational) contexts.
This was the point where I chose to ‘cross the streams’ and collapse the strict boundaries I’d long maintained between what I did at work and what I did outside of work.
I pitched the idea of a radio component to the Summer Summit, to add something extra and interactive to the online event. ALT were responsive, so I put the call out for expressions of interest from the learning technology community and ended up with some new DJs for the show.
On the Thursday night, after the conference had drawn to a close, two sectoral colleagues that I had recruited made their radio debuts and one with some prior radio experience played on TTNS for the first time. I played a set too and ALTc Radio was born.
It worked well enough to repeat the experiment over a handful more of the online ALTc events that continued while the UK shimmied in and out of varying Covid lockdowns. By 2022, ALT was tentatively stepping into the precarious world of running a conference in a hybrid way and TTNS remained along for the journey, but still only online at this point.
It also ended up one of the more memorable times I’ve ever spent on the radio. It was the day that the death of Queen Elizabeth was announced.
I had to figure out at pretty short notice whether our little Internet radio station had any broadcast obligations in the circumstances for a response to the moment. Internet radio being global, we concluded that we didn’t and that the show must go on, so we ended up soundtracking delegates’ journeys home or their moments of switching off from work anyway.
It’s not out of the question that one of the later TTNS DJs put a certain Sex Pistols track on that night, but I couldn’t possibly say at this point in time.
Inventing Conference Radio
Bumping into each other at a sectoral event in early 2023, then ALT CEO Maren Deepwell asked me if I’d be up for bringing ALTc Radio to the next in-person conference. The difference would be that this time it would be as a more substantial part of the overall programme, rather than just an after event. It was also ALT’s 30th anniversary as an organisation, so it would be a special event.
I jumped at the chance and set to work scaling up ALTc Radio for a full selection of parallel programming. A conference fringe, on the radio, if you like. I would end up bumping up operations from 4 to 30 hours of radio programming.
The 2023 conference was due to be held at the University of Warwick. On site, they provided a glass-fronted booth for the station amidst the exhibition stands, giving us an actual pop-up radio station rather than just being a bunch of DJs broadcasting from their homes.
The programme consisted of a mix of on-site music sets from the booth, live online ones beamed into the venue and onto the Web, and pre-recorded shows, including a spotlight of various podcasts that explore different issues across post-secondary education and learning technology. All three keynotes were being live streamed on YouTube, so this was fed into the overall radio mix too.
The roster included well-known figures from the learning technology community making their radio debuts, a handful of new voices, and some of the existing TTNS DJs that had come via previous iterations of ALTc Radio.
The whole programme was simulcast throughout the entire conference, including across the two exhibition floors at the venue too, and live for free over the Web. This meant that the whole event was soundtracked throughout, whether people were there in person or not. It felt somewhat like being at the breaking of a new medium.
In 2024, ALTc came back to Manchester and the radio component returned, having succeeded with the proof-of-concept the year before. This time, I put together 43 hours of original radio programming and had 20 new DJs from the learning technology community sharing their practice and playing their choices of songs to a distributed audience of their peers.
Last year in Glasgow was the third consecutive year of running a full hybrid parallel programme from one of the conference venues, and we went up to a full 48 hours of conference radio. I even had a co-host, as TTNS’s Coco was also at ALTc that year.
Since 2024, a 60-minute radio show has been included as part of the calls for proposals when ALT seeks contributions for the conference. Not an option I’ve seen any other conference making in their calls for proposals.
Sectoral Expressions
ALTc Radio has acted as a vehicle for bringing a musical layer to this particular professional community.
One of the things that surprised me most about this strange new medium of conference radio was the impact of introducing music as part of the sensory mix of a conference environment. It was noticeable in Warwick to see some delegates arrive at the venue with a spring in their step as they heard a song that they liked when they walked through the doors.
Basing the station at the conference venue fuses the music and chat with the buzz of the in-person event but it also ensures that those nowhere near it can still get a feeling of participation in ALTc from a distance.
As a rule, music at conferences is rare and is usually only played in discrete areas or deployed as filler when it is included. Music, however, can bring joy, create nostalgia, generate rhythm, and forge community — the latter aside, not typically things that tend to be associated with a conference. As TTNS is fully licensed, this makes the music element possible.
I’ve tended to frame the ALTc Radio programmes around the question ‘What does learning technology sound like?’ Unsurprisingly, the answer to this is that this community sounds highly eclectic, which also seems most fitting for a branch of TTNS.
Across each of the iterations of ALTc Radio that I have described, over 40 members of the learning technology community from a wide range of institutions have now made individual, collective and in some cases repeat contributions to ALTc via this novel medium.
Jo Elliot from Queen Mary, University of London provided a pre-recorded show with Puiyin Wong. She commented afterwards:
Being part of the radio programme allowed me to still feel part of the conference…the conversational nature of radio is ideal for talking about teaching and learning (and) unlike with a podcast for example, you knew people were listening live.
At its core, ALTc Radio has become a vehicle for sharing and reflecting on professional practice within and beyond the learning technology community, and a somewhat different contribution to a conference than more conventional methods like presentations, journal articles, workshops and social media posts. A means for our presenters to show a different side to their professional selves than the ones they may usually present at these events.
At Jisc’s Digifest event in March last year, I was delighted to be recipient of a Jisc Community Champion Award, in the Community Pioneers category. It was fascinating to see the emphasis that a sectoral aggregator like Jisc places on a notion as arguably nebulous as community.
The award itself was a nice little wooden badge. What was more noticeable though was that Jisc used the event to bring together a bunch of people that had been building communities at their own intersections between technology and education, and to forge a new meta-community as a result.
In becoming a Community Champion, Jisc gave myself and the other champions several reasons to want to spend time in each other’s company and share ideas about community-building, which both led up to Digifest and beyond the event. It reminded me of the importance of celebrating your community with itself.
Community Amidst The Techlash
You’ve listened to my stories today and I thank you for your ears and your attention in that. But does any of this matter, and if so, why? Are there any useful lessons that can come from TTNS and ALTc Radio in a challenging and ever-changing world?
As the development of ALTc Radio has shown, the principles that were applied to the growth of TTNS for building genuine community in online spaces — openness, authenticity, creative freedom, human connection — can also be applied in unexpected professional contexts to solve real engagement problems and enhance activities in unexpected ways.
More importantly, perhaps, the digital world has become a more difficult place to be in recent times. I believe that community is one of the mitigations for that, as of course it also is in so many IRL contexts too.
I remember during the 1990s sensing the digitisation directions that the world was moving towards and aspiring to get my very own personal computer. I realised that if I didn’t learn how to use one, I risked being left behind. Then, as one millennium made way for another and just like Rheingold in the previous decade, I plugged my new computer into my telephone line and made contact with other people from around the world.
Ironically, it was through music where the Internet first made sense to me, via the peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster. Then, with mp3.com, I found a route to sharing the music that I was locally involved in making with the wider world without having to find a record label to release it first.
When I moved to Japan in 2003, I was able to stay connected with the people I’d left behind in Britain and keep them easily updated on my adventures. With blogging, I was able to become the published writer that I had long aspired to be. And with the rise of social media, distributed communities of interest not bound by proximity would follow.
In short, computers and the Internet gave me (and millions of other people) freedoms I would likely otherwise never have had and connections I would likely never have made. However, the Wild West nature and wide-open spaces of the earlier web would soon start getting not only tamed but also locked down, monopolised, and in today’s terminology, increasingly enshittified, despite the layers of open principles and protocols that the Internet had been established with.
It is not difficult in 2026, ten years after the Cambridge Analytica revelations made me give up on regularly using Facebook, to find examples of what we might call the ‘techlash’.
The World Wide Web has become an increasingly enclosed space, stalked by giant corporations far bigger than the industrial monopolists of an earlier age ever managed to become. Social media has brought us a new world of echo chambers, doomscrolling, and algorithmic surveillance.
And now, by some perspectives, Generative AI threatens to rob us of what it even means to be human, filling our screens and attention spans with slop-derived simulations of our very humanity and colonising our physical world with the ever expanding growth of the data centres that are needed to generate the slop on our screens.
One of the core features of the Internet has been that it has always changed, always evolved, and always seen new players and platforms rise and fall. However, in my view, we forget at our peril the lessons that emancipatory digital freedoms, otherwise impossible connections across borders, and the positive affordances of becoming somebody else online that have characterised earlier phases of the Web.
Community is, I think, one of those bulwarks against what the place once known as cyberspace has come to resemble and a way to ensure that it continues to be a place worth giving our attentions to.
I’ve tried to tell a tale today via The Thursday Night Show and ALTc Radio of how to build, nurture and sustain communities online, and how successful ones can spill over into the real world too. I’ll summarise today’s talk with a short list of some of the lessons that I’ve learned as principles in nurturing these digital communities that people actually care about.
These are as follows:
- Embrace openness
- Provide somewhere worth being part of
3. Task people with what suits them
4. Help each other
5. Provide a regular rhythm to activities
6. Platform for diversity
7. Keep it simple
8. Provide multiple modes of interaction
9. Be prepared for challenge and change
10. Meet in-person sometimes
Let’s given the final word today to Aaron Swartz, who had a role in the development of RSS, Reddit and Creative Commons. In what turned out to be his final interview, included in the documentary about his life ‘The Internet’s Own Boy’, he spoke about the opposing views of the Internet as somewhere either fully utopian or fully dystopian:
There’s sort of these two polarising perspectives, right? Everything is great. The Internet has created all this freedom and liberty, and everything’s going to be fantastic. Or, everything’s terrible. The Internet has created all these tools for cracking down, and spying, and controlling what we say.
The thing is, both are true — right? The Internet has done both. And both are kind of amazing and astonishing. And which one will win out in the long run is up to us. It doesn’t make sense to make out that one is doing better than the other. They’re both true, and it’s up to us which ones we emphasise and which ones we take advantage of, because they’re both there and they’re both always going to be there.
In the spirit of what Swartz was articulating, I’d like to think that TTNS and ALTc Radio are part of my personal and professional contributions to making being online a place worth being.
Thank you.
