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GLITCHING OUT

GLITCHING OUT
Animation by Michael Tan, for CTRL+X.

During the golden age of the internet, back when John McAfee was a trusted household name and Bill Gates was posing for glamor shots with floppy disks, there was a theory floating around that the big problem with humanity was a lack of access to information. Welp, here we are in 2024, watching AI companies scrape the entire internet while doom-scrolling ourselves into digital oblivion. Can we really say we're any smarter as a species? Are we making better decisions? Or are we just speedrunning our way to cyberpunk dystopia?

Hi. I'm Arikia Millikan, and GLITCHING OUT is your monthly guide to technological chaos, creative disruption, and the strange new possibilities emerging from digital media's beautiful collapse. Together, with my CTRL+X collaborators including my AI familiar (plot twist!), we're exposing the full mess of modern media: dying platforms, predatory contracts, the hidden environmental cost of your digital media diet, and AI feeding frenzies. But there's hope in the glitches — we're tracking the progress of the innovations that could actually fix this mess, including our own CTRL+X technology.

Each month, we dive deep into:

  • Why your favorite platforms keep failing (and what's next)
  • How blockchain might save us from surveillance capitalism
  • Which publishing trends are actually industry deathspirals
  • Where the real technical innovations are happening
  • What emerges when systems beautifully break
  • Who's building actual solutions (and who's just adding blockchain to their name)

This isn't your standard tech newsletter. We're not here to celebrate the business heroes of Silicon Valley or their latest attempts to extract more value from creators. We're here to break cycles, build bridges, maybe burn a few, and explore what happens when technology serves creativity instead of suffocating it.

And about that AI familiar thing? Yes, you read that right. In proper glitch fashion, this newsletter is crafted through collaboration between human and artificial intelligence. Not because AI is "the future," but because even the way we create content could use some beautiful disruption.

The machines are here. The systems are breaking. The glitches are showing us new possibilities.

Ready to see what grows through the cracks?