wreckage/salvage is a tiny studio from me, Erin Kissane. It's a display case for small research projects and long-form explorations. It's also a home for a membership program for people who want to financially—and spiritually—support my work in the intertidal zone of network history, cultural protocols, and patterns for online life.

Things I'll be making and doing here:

  • Notes about the cultural and technical qualities that give our tools their character and shape the way we use them.
  • Research and collaboration invitations, progress reports, and findings.
  • Interviews with people working on and within new-school networks and systems, conducted with an eye to weaving better forms of credit and citation for the work people have been doing all this long while.
  • Posts digging into high-quality studies on the shape, structure, and dynamics of social media and other systems for connection and collaboration.

…and maybe some things shaped like books.

membership as community

For the people who throw in with me as members, I'll also be doing some behind-the-scenes correspondence, discussion posts with comments turned on like a paleolithic website, and early access to big projects, as well as to anything that escapes internet orbit and makes it into print. (I wrote more about my sense of membership here.)

If you choose a higher tier of support, I’ll also offer a quarterly 1:1 call or brownbag Q&A on the network/community topic of your choice, possibly including things like "How should our organization integrate into the fediverse, if at all?" or "Please explain what's in your research that could help us build a better and safer [specific thing] so I don't have to read 80,000+ words to get it."

Maybe think of it like a Patreon or a Substack except all the writing and research will continue to be available for free, thanks to the folks who throw in to help me set aside the time to do it. (And also…not on Substack.)

you may know me from

  • My personal site, where I've been noodling on network thinking since I crept back onto the internet in 2022. Big projects I documented there include the Meta in Myanmar series and a substantial collaborative ethnographic research project on the way server teams actually govern their servers and themselves on the Fediverse.
  • The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic, a giant volunteer crisis data project I co-ran with Alexis Madrigal. (Reveal did a great podcast about the project and the institutional failures that made it necessary.)
  • OpenNews, a fantastic small organization incubated at the Mozilla Foundation that brings together people who work with code, data, and design in news organizations. I was a founding member of the OpenNews team and my five years I spent there taught me more about making things for humans than all my previous jobs combined.
  • My earlier work as a developmental editor, editorial strategist, researcher, community lead, and writer working in and around web agencies and publishing houses starting in the late 1990s.
  • Oh and I wrote The Elements of Content Strategy, an early concise handbook for doing editorial strategy (which we got bullied into calling "content strategy," despite my best efforts) online. Its publisher, A Book Apart, closed up shop this year, but you can read it for free now in a beautiful web edition designed by Jason Santa Maria.

why wreckage/salvage

Living near the Columbia River Bar and learning the rhythms of the bar as a maritime shipping corridor—the pilot boats, the bright yellow Seahawk I see on errands and school runs, the huge bulk carriers anchored and waiting for clearance on the river—has rewired me, a bit, too. Joanne Rideout's wonderful daily Ship Report got me through the bumpy transition to rural life and then the first years of the pandemic, when it felt like we'd moved to the moon. I think differently here.

The site, and the tiny studio it represents, are named after the debris of a disaster because I don't think we can get far without acknowledging the wreckage piled up around us, on our networks and far beyond them. It's also named after the process of turning that rubble into something we can think with and work with, because I imagine that's the mode I'll be working in for the rest of my life.

I'm obviously indebted to Adrienne Rich, but maybe less obviously to Walter Benjamin, whose passage on Klee's disconcerting angel in "On the Concept of History" is always with me. Dionne Brand's essays and poetry, along with Christina Sharpe's work, have long since changed the way I think about the ocean, but it wasn't until the day I finally launched this site that I saw the title of Brand's new work of literary criticism—Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. I can think of no better lighthouse.

colophon/dateline

I made this site using Ghost and a hacked-up version of the Renge theme. The big pulpy-paperback-novel typeface is Nick Sherman's wonderful Margo, the utility font is the adorable Covik Sans, and body text is currently set in Besley. The images that illustrate the posts are drawn from the many wonderful collections NOAA has put online.

I am writing from where I live, in the homelands of the Clatsop tribe and in what is currently the sprawling, fractious American empire that controls the vast majority of the social internet, along with so much else. As I hit publish, it's October 9, 2024.

This site has RSS, of course, and you can also get posts as emails for free (or support my work, which means the world to me).

reaching me

I'm easily contacted by email (erin at wrecka.ge) and I'm on Mastodon (@kissane@mas.to) and Bluesky (@kissane.bsky.social).