Designer and engineer interested in computational archaeology: recovering abandoned computing paradigms and rebuilding them with modern tools.
Also a wooden boatbuilder.
Former Recurser.
Currently ITP @ NYU
Designer and engineer interested in computational archaeology: recovering abandoned computing paradigms and rebuilding them with modern tools.
Also a wooden boatbuilder.
Former Recurser.
Currently ITP @ NYU
Pocket Web
A platform where physical presence equals digital presence - plug in a USB drive and your website goes live; unplug it and it disappears.
The Concept
Pocket Web started as a bit of a joke for one of my classes. I was thinking about the human side of networks, and thought it would be neat to have a web where all sites lived in physical drives that had to be plugged in to be seen by everyone else. Every site existed in a single drive, and thus every site had a custodian who carried that drive around. There was no other form of long-term memory in the system.
| Traditional Web | Pocket Web |
|-----------------|------------|
| Always-on, centerless | Intermittent, local |
| Content persists forever | Content disappears when you leave |
| Servers never "leave" | Drive present = site online |
| Identity is abstract | Identity is tangible (possession of drive) |
I spent about a week working on it, and by the end had a functional network.
The Argument
> "The internet is a dead lake, governed by dead time, which we cross countless times but can never really linger on."
The always-on internet is a product of what Lewis Mumford called mechanical time — the regimentation that starts with the clock and culminates in servers humming continuously in basements with no sense of finality. Jünger called this "dead time" to contrast it with the biological, live time that governs everything else.
Pocket Web reintroduces something like biological time to the network. Sites come online when their steward is present, and disappear when they leave. Like LowTech Magazine's solar-powered server that dies on cloudy days, unavailability becomes a feature.
> "Pocket Web is not the internet, because its data is finite, singular, and must have a steward: in this sense, it is a fantasy."
The modern web is multiplicative — every packet, cache, and backup is an act of replication. Pocket Web inverts this: one drive per site, one steward per drive. Lose the drive, lose the site.
> "We're pretty good at learning what something is by first figuring out what it isn't."
Pocket Web is speculative technology — impractical, but useful as conceptual scaffolding. By building something that resembles the internet but isn't, we get clues for what the internet actually is.
How It Works
1. Register a site on the Pocket Web platform (claim a URL)
2. Download the Holder app — a menu bar application
3. Prepare a USB drive with your site content (`.site.html`)
4. Plug in the drive → The Holder app detects it, connects to the server, your site goes live
5. Unplug the drive → Site instantly goes offline
Technical Details
- Server: Phoenix/Elixir with WebSocket connections via Phoenix Presence
- Holder App: Electron menu bar app that monitors USB drives
- Protocol: Custom content protocol with manifest-based uploads
The architecture is stateless by design — when the WebSocket connection dies, the Elixir process dies with it and nothing is retained on the server.