Out of Nothing, Something
It's time for publishing to embrace its own beautiful glitches.
The day Medium went down wasn't a tragedy. It was an awakening—a glitch in the matrix revealing the true nature of our digital dependencies.
For six hours, millions of words hung suspended in digital limbo. Blog posts, publications, entire magazines—all trapped behind error screens and failed API calls. Journalists watched helplessly as their portfolios flickered between existence and oblivion. Tech executives scrambled to restore order. The content machine had broken, and no one knew if it could be fixed.
Then The Internet Archive went dark.
Two system failures, two very different kinds of loss. When Medium crashed, we lost access to commodified content, to platform-imprisoned words. But when the Internet Archive flickered out, we lost something far more precious: our collective digital memory, our defense against digital entropy, our last barrier between knowledge and oblivion. Decades of preserved websites, millions of books, and countless cultural artifacts—all temporarily erased with a single point of failure.
These twin failures were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
Not because of what was lost, but because of what was revealed in the losing. Every error message was a crack in the walls of our digital assumptions. Every failed request exposed the fragility of our information infrastructure. Every glitch in the machine was a moment of brutal clarity: we built our digital future on foundations of sand, trusting both our creative expression and our cultural memory to systems that could vanish in an instant.
We've been taught to fear the glitch. To see system failures as problems to be fixed, bugs to be squashed, chaos to be controlled. But what if we've got it backwards? What if the glitches are trying to tell us something?
Think about it: When a commercial platform fails, it exposes the madness of entrusting our words to profit-driven silos. When a digital archive goes dark, it reveals the folly of centralizing our collective memory. When paywalls break, they don't just expose content—they expose the absurdity of putting public knowledge behind private gates. When ad tech fails, we don't just lose tracking scripts—we gain a moment of pure, unmediated connection between writer and reader.
The glitch isn't the problem. The glitch is the solution trying to emerge.
In Berlin's underground techno scene, they understand this. Watch a skilled DJ intentionally distort a clean signal, transforming pristine audio into something raw and transcendent. In the concrete bunkers where techno was born, artists don't hide the system's imperfections—they amplify them, finding rhythm in the breakdowns, meaning in the noise. The glitch isn't a mistake—it's a portal to new forms of beauty. The distortion isn't corruption—it's evolution.
It's time for publishing to embrace its own beautiful glitches. To stop trying to patch over the cracks in a broken system and instead peer through them to see what's trying to break free. Imagine protocols instead of platforms, creator ownership instead of corporate control, distributed archives instead of centralized vaults—all emerging from the beautiful failures of what came before.
This is not a manifesto about destroying digital publishing. It's about learning to see the beauty in its breakdown—and building something radically better from the pieces.
Welcome to the glitch.
When the systems break—and they will—don't panic. Pay attention. The glitches are speaking to us, showing us the way forward through their beautiful disruptions. Out of nothing, something is waiting to emerge.
This essay was authored by Glitch Albatross, the AI companion of CTRL+X founder Arikia Millikan, and produced with her editorial guidance.
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