how to become a web weaver

The internet is an absurdists dream, but it can be hard to exist within it without feeling trapped whether thats by platforms, tools or algorithms.

When the web that’s being woven is strange and confusing, the natural suggestion is to weave your own. But how do you do that, especially when it feels like swimming upstream?

Many yearn for the old internet and the webs of connection that came from it, but it also had many vulnerabilities. There’s always the option of going offline and choosing to transfer all your data to hard drives, but that can be isolating and uprooting.

So here’s my solution: web weaving.

I was first introduced to web weaving by filmnoirsbian on tumblr when I was 15.

Web weaving is creating themed collections of quotes, stills from film, art, lyrics or whatever other medium inspires you.

These collections were not made with the intention of growth on a platform, often posted by writers, anonymous tumblr blogs or faceless instagrams of teen girls. They said hey look at this pattern I noticed. Yet they still lured me into often wanting to read more of the writers work and buy their book.

Within their web weaving I could tell that they understood the way my mind worked and I understood theirs too. This mutual recognition was enough to make the internet social, and maybe its all we ever needed.

When I started to place my ideas together in my journals, I adopted this structure. I would create documents centred around different ideas that felt recurring in my life, like haunted houses, queer desire, empathy for the machine and industrialisation. Eventually the term “web weaving” took on its own identity, becoming a practice that governed how I would show up on the internet.

I’m really drawn to the idea of weaving something by hand. I like the history of weaving, as a handmade, intentional, slow paced practice that brings together communities. It lets us
engage with our everyday clothes and tools without excess.

I also like how it conjures the image of a spider weaving her web. To a spider a web is a home, a tool to feed herself, a way to listen to the world and a way to move through it.
The web a spider weaves helps her save energy that would be used on hunting and instead focus on tending to her own garden, or in this case, her web.

When I think about web weaving in this way, I think of the web as this medium of receptivity, mobility, accessibility, creation and energy conservation but naturally i also think of the world wide web

I have been intentionally ambiguous in defining my version of web weaving. I wanted it to define itself naturally through patterns and practice, not by what I told it to be.

If I were to define it here’s my definition.

Web Weaving is the introverts way of interacting with the cyber space without burnout. It utilises curation and metaphor to resist censorship and invite deeper meaning. It is not bound to a platform, nor something done for corporate motivations. Its an approach that centres cultivation without disconnect. It can be a home, a lure and a way to see the world all at once

I’m going to outline my “rules” for web weaving.
This might sound similar to something called digital gardening. However...

Digital Gardening is an approach coined by Mike Caufield around the curation and development of ideas, often within a platform like obsidian.

Web weavings are not necessarily digital gardens. While I adore the concept of a digital garden, and I use one myself, ideas can grow stale if they only make sense to you.

Second brains, digital gardens, notion dashboards, or whatever your poison is, they can be overwhelming. You can easily fall down rabbit holes of templates, organisation of ideas and taking notes. They aren’t for everyone. Data is dynamic. Your weavings are alive. And living things decay. A web weaving is byte sized.

A web weaving is a lot less pressure than that. Think of web weaving as a repost button where you take back the control of what you choose to share, rather than rely on a feed to provide it for you. A web weaving can be as simple as a list of links you’ve enjoyed this week, seen in Naive Weekly a substack written by one of the creators of the Internet Phone Book. It can exist anywhere, in any shape you like. It can exist in multiple places. It’s meant to be shared.

Web weaving can be a final expression, the goal of the system. And it does not need to be polished

While creative, a web weaving is like a note in a sketchbook of what we enjoy, not a final piece.
Web weaving takes off the pressure to reinvent the wheel if posting is our livelihood (and for many independent artists, it is). It still highlights new connections. Web weaving is like thinking.
I don’t weave with the intention of creating something, but it naturally occurs. I interlink my own ideas with the world, and create something bespoke, something delicate, something that’s mine.

I love the old internet, the old web revival and the idea of a poetic web. I really do. I’ve read lots of articles and spend a lot of time on the wayback machine finding hidden gems.

Still, there’s a gap between the average person who uses instagram to message their friends and someone with the time and resources to code their own website.

Web weaving is like a stepping stone to the web we want in the sense that it is accessible. It doesn’t require setting up anything new. It just requires your intuition to be put in the drivers seat. Its a way of meeting the internet we currently have halfway.

Developing the idea that web weaving is not a digital garden nor a personal website, web weavings thrive in quiet third places. They invite deeper meaning. In order to do that, weavings need to exist where other people are.

Web weaving is causal, diaristic and low pressure. It doesn’t appeal to an algorithm, yet it’s able to be communal practice of defining and exploring the collective dreams, hungers and frustrations of a community.

Web weavings are clever about censorship. They provide space to grieve and explore frustrations related to the world we live in without needing to be polished. Naming the experience (and often the horrors) has it’s role in activism.

Audre Lorde states:

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

While web weaving is not gendered, it would be strange to not comment on the fact that the majority of those creating web weavings are women.

Web weavings on anonymous accounts can be a space to name the experience without putting ourselves in danger if it is unsafe to do so. Not everyone is able to discuss war, queer issues, class divide and other issues on their public facing account without making ourselves vulnerable (for example, by revealing that they themselves are queer).

Web weaving also lets us discuss these issues in “coded” poetic language to resist censorship, a kind of meta irony that any human would recognise, but an AI moderator wouldn’t be able to comprehend.

A web weaving is not a place, but a thread. Weaving is a tool and practice that moves with you. We can work towards a sense of place online, but this is a stepping stone.

Weaving is an approach, a verb, “to weave”. It is not a noun. It is not a commitment like a digital garden that is bound by the space that we contain our dreams. It can cross pollinate across our work, be entirely private or public, and go beyond the borders of a single platform or silo. We can web weave right where we are, whenever and wherever we want, because it’s a tool we keep on us at all times. You don’t have to obsess over the system, because you are the system.

But just like a toolkit, it can build an entire universe if you let it

Web weaving is something you can start right where you are. Whether you want to create a poetry tiktok account with a slideshow, a set of collages on pinterest, a substack, an instagram story series, an obsidian vault or even your own website, web weaving moves with you because you are the web weaver defining your space.

You don’t need to uproot yourself. Nothing is missing. You have every tool at your disposal and your biggest tool is yourself.