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Here’s a big promise: A new Kickstarter campaign aims to usher in the “return of the human internet.”
That’s the tagline of a crowdfunding campaign for The Phoenix Project, an initiative from the online culture and commentary magazine Flaming Hydra. If you back The Phoenix Project, you’re supporting three things — a one-off print magazine designed to celebrate “the values and fun of the early internet,” a new e-book service for libraries, and a newsletter subscription/archiving program that’s also designed for libraries.
To Flaming Hydra’s lead editor Maria Bustillos, these disparate projects are “basically all one thing,” tied together by the goal of “protecting freedom of information” and fulfilling the “promise of the early internet, where you’re making information available to as many people as possible, while still protecting the right of artists and authors to make a living.”
Bustillos told me that these issues have been highlighted on Flaming Hydra itself, for example when Tal Levin wrote about finding countless AI-generated clones of his book on Amazon. By “creating an ecosystem that is based in people working together, who are offering their stuff in a context that is controlled and doesn’t allow” others to create and sell AI-generated clones, Bustillos said Flaming Hydra is “part of the human project.”
“AI is not this unstoppable force,” she added. “If people just set up publishing pipelines and networks and organizations that are dedicated to the human internet, people who want to read stuff can go to them, and it’s actually completely isolated from mechanistic interference.”
The Phoenix Project fits into this vision by making the work of human writers more accessible to libraries.
Back in 2020, Bustillos wrote about the e-book systems dominating libraries and schools. In one example, instead of just buying a book, a school had to pay $27 per student per year for continued access to copies of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
This is symptomatic of a broader system that treats true ownership of e-books and other digital media as a thing of the past. Instead, we “license” these e-books from their publishers, and they can be altered or removed at any time.
“E-books are books,” Bustillos said. “They’re not some other thing. They are books, and people should be able to own them, and libraries should be able to own them, and media should be able to be owned. All digital media should be able to be owned.”
In her view, ownership boils down to a simple question: “If you are at the mercy of somebody who can shut the book off, you do not own it.”
So even beyond the question of ongoing payments, there have also been examples of e-books being altered or removed from readers’ devices long after their purchase. Bustillos acknowledged that for individual pieces of media, this distinction may not seem like a big deal, “but if it’s all the textbooks for everybody, if it’s all the books,” then it’s a real problem.
Flaming Hydra and The Phoenix Project seek to solve this by letting libraries truly purchase and own e-books. They can then lend those e-books to their patrons through a new, open source “library in a box” system called Lenny for Libraries.
The Phoenix Project is starting by offering five new e-books from Flaming Hydra writers, including collections of writing from The Awl, and of essays by Tom Scocca and Bustillos herself. That might sound like a relatively small start, but Bustillos said she’s talking to library consortiums and author groups, and the goal here is to “change the conversation” around e-books and digital archiving and lending. So The Phoenix Project could be paving the way for other initiatives that follow a similar model.
Similarly, The Phoenix Foundry Archive is designed to make paywalled newsletter content available to libraries. Bustillos noted that “so much of the best journalism, criticism, essays” is now being published in paywalled newsletters that are inaccessible to libraries (as well as the Internet Archive).
With Phoenix, newsletter writers (starting with those who use Ghost, with support for additional newsletter platforms coming in the future) will be able to offer subscriptions to libraries, similar to the way libraries can subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Once it’s set up, Phoenix will automatically convert whichever newsletter posts the writer wants into EPUB documents, which are then sent to libraries for digital lending.
Flaming Hydra has been working on all this even before launching the Kickstarter, and Bustillos said she was grateful for the financial support from backers like Anand Raganathan, Brewster Kahle, and Paul Ford. But by turning to crowdfunding, Bustillos said Flaming Hydra can better protect the work, ensuring that it remains sustainable and independent.
“We don’t have to be at the mercy of anybody, and it also protects editorial independence,” she said. “Those things go hand in hand.”
Flaming Hydra seeks to raise $30,000 for The Phoenix Project, with the campaign ending on November 27.
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