The Slow Circle Charter
Toward a nuanced, organic, farm-fresh circlejerk.
Appreciation went industrial. A feed can produce ten thousand likes an hour, and not one of them can tell you where it was grown. We would rather have less.
This site is a small farm. It has one field, one farmer, and one regular at the stand, and the two of them get along famously. We say this for provenance. You do not need an audience. You need a neighbor.
1. Know your jerker.
Praise should come from someone whose name you can say, a person with a homepage and a second page about what they are up to right now. That is a relationship. Anything larger is a feedlot. We want to be liked by eleven people, thoroughly, and to like them back at a rate they can feel. Anonymous appreciation is rainfall. Nobody thanks a cloud.
2. A webring is a circle with a Next button.
You click Next and arrive at a neighbor. You click Next again and arrive, eventually, back at yourself, slightly dizzy and fully appreciated. A dozen rings is not too many. It is crop rotation.
3. Praise in season.
Factory praise is available all year, which is how you know it is fake. Praise that arrives a week late, in the footnote of an unrelated post, is craft. In spring you sign a guestbook. In summer you add someone to your blogroll. In autumn they add you back, and that is the harvest. In winter you publish a ledger of everything you did not finish and call it tending. Nothing dies in this garden. Even the frost is an issue.
4. Small-batch validation.
Peer review is when a peer reviews you, and you are peers because you are in the same ring. This is the artisanal alternative to a department. Offer every post in MLA, APA, Chicago, and BibTeX, so that a colleague three rings over can cite you correctly in their piece about how good you are. Nobody will do this. The point is that they could.
5. Number everything, then ask to be forgotten.
Give each post an issue number. Keep a heatmap of every day you wrote, shaded by how hard. Then, humbly, wish to remain unremarkable. A farmer does not want to be famous either. A farmer also labels every jar. A daily streak is a circle with one member, which is the hardest kind to keep and the easiest kind to chair.
6. Free-range ideas.
An idea should be allowed to roam across four thousand words before breakfast, and before anyone asks what it is for. It should be raised by a human, and say so on a badge, 88 pixels by 31. Ours was raised by something.
7. One tier, everybody eats.
Membership costs less than a coffee, and there is one tier. If nobody joins, the tier still exists, and existing is the one thing a tier is for. Do not measure a club by its members. Measure it by the number of ways to pay. We expect to be bad at collecting. We expect to write about that too.
A site with one reader is a very small circle. We have measured it. It is exactly the size of one person turning around to look at themselves, kindly. We sign our own guestbook when it gets quiet. We wrote this charter and then cited it. That is the smallest ring there is, and it closes, and it has a Next button.
Now go build someone up. Yes, you.
Further reading: this post.