Elan Ullendorff

Anti-viral with Hallie Bateman "People didn’t want the nicer thing. They wanted the $25 print they can tape to the wall."

the wonderful @halliebateman.bsky.social is an artist and a human being and following her work is a gift and a treasure, so this interview with her by @elan.place was appropriately also a gift and a treasure

Redemption Songs: A Limited-Run Newsletter The story of mass incarceration, one song at a time.

We’re launching Redemption Songs, a limited-run newsletter that spotlights one song each week by incarcerated artists. Starting March 22, we’ll tell the story of mass incarceration over almost a century, one song at a time.

Sign up now to get a new song each Sunday afternoon over 25 weeks:

Bad Bunny 101

A Google Sheet that is a six-week syllabus for getting you into Bad Bunny

adding to my Doc Web repository

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Anti-viral with Hallie Bateman

A screenshot of a colorful, quirky webshop

Hand-drawn figures walking in various directions on crayon-textured paths. In the center is the text "it's a miracle we ever met."

I spoke with @halliebateman.bsky.social about how the internet can trick you into being static, the miracle of anyone connecting with literally anything online, and why people don’t want to pay $75 for a museum-quality print from “commercial artists.”

escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/anti-viral...

Saw an Instagram reel in which the CEO of McDonalds answers the question "how do you use AI" by eagerly explaining that he no longer needs to get his family together to take holiday photos because he can just generate them instead.

Student looking at a zine called cyberpunk apocalypse with a grainy photo of shadowed people and recreating it as a website

Student on a computer next do a bunch of zines splayed on a table

Student looking at a zine in front of a shelf full of zines

Student drawing on a computer at a table with other students

My favorite annual tradition is taking my Escape the Algorithm students to a local zine library called The Soapbox to talk about radical publishing + expressive design. While we’re there, the students each pick a zine and recreate it as a website.

This year’s web zines: leaflet.pub/aed57e9a-d7d...

On coffee filters and filter bubbles and a banner ad that was good, actually

On coffee filters and filter bubbles

escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/on-coffee-...

“The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is. They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world. (Note: This quote is fake and does not appear in Simulacra and Simulation. I tried to delete it, but the system doesn't allow that because this quote has "too many fans" lol.)” — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Thinking once again about this comment under a Simulacra and Simulation quote on Goodreads that’s the best illustration of a simulacrum I've ever seen.

Screenshot of New York Times story with a banner ad that reads "(1) View PDF" and has a download button

normal ad seems safe

Anti-viral with Alicia Kennedy "People just want you to talk about yourself"

"It’s hard to imagine getting back to a time [when] discoverability of people’s work and ideas was possible in a way that I don’t think it is anymore... I find more new stuff in actual magazines now... The internet is no longer a way for me to find new stuff, it’s just a place where stuff is."

Anti-viral with Alicia Kennedy "People just want you to talk about yourself"

For the first installment, a conversation with the wonderful @aliciadkennedy.bsky.social about…why nobody wants her to have conversations.

escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/anti-viral...

Anti-viral with Alicia Kennedy "People just want you to talk about yourself"

Today I’m excited to launch Anti-viral, a series where I talk to creatives about projects that struggle to find an audience—not to label these projects as failures, but to explore the meaningful, essential work our platforms and economies overlook.

escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/anti-viral...

Accepting "I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein." into the canon of captions that would work on any New Yorker cartoon.

flyer for a course at penn called escape the algorithm. praise from past students: "this class was unlike any other one i've taken. it felt real and personal." "I'd enthusiastically recommend this course to anyone interested in platform design, media studies, or just figuring out how to move through the web more intentionally." "Escape the Algorithm taught me how to unsee the internet I thought I knew, and begin imagining what a more human, slower, stranger digital future could look like." "This class really reshaped how I think, create, and collaborate." "This course has been one of the most creatively liberating and intellectually stimulating experiences I've had at Penn."

teaching my escape the algorithm course again and it’s such a joy to be able to put such kind testimonials on the flyer 🥺

The Internet Phone book lying on a page being colored on by a child

spread of the Internet Phone Book

spread of the Internet Phone Book

Internet phone book carried in a pocketbook

I’m honored to have my essay The New Turing Test published in the Internet Phone Book, now in its second reprint through @metalabel.bsky.social

Revenue is split between contributors and the Living Web Institute, which has the goal of cultivating a better web

livingweb.metalabel.com/internetphon...

Instagram screenshot, post by 404mediaco: freelance developers and entire companies are making a business out of fixing shoddy vibe coded software

whoever said AI won’t create jobs can eat their hat now

Gifting Interfaces A collection of gifts developed by students at the School for Poetic Computation's Gift Interfaces class in Winter 2025.

Exploring the concept of gifting through experimental design — this is the beauty of the internet when it’s totally free from engagement-maxing algorithms and corporations.

Highly recommend diving into this collection from @spencer.place and @elan.place's Gifting Interfaces class.

White Noise Has Become Part of Life’s Soundtrack. But Who’s Behind It? From crickets to rain to cellphones vibrating, white noise keeps evolving.

It was an honor to talk to Willa Paskin about artisanal white noise for @slate.com’s excellent Decoder Ring podcast

slate.com/podcasts/dec...

In late March, @spencer.place and I wrapped up our Gift Interfaces class at @sfpc-study.bsky.social. On our last day, we threw a gift wrapping party. Then we opened them together. The resulting website represents the archive of our work together:

gifting-interfaces.pages.dev

upside down picture of victoria from white lotus with her thumb up. caption reads "(sighs, chuckles)"

the economy

🌳 new work

> Over the past couple of years, I’ve been marking the seasons by the inhale and exhale of this tree.

tree.kayserifserif.place/

substack feed post 1: I don't care if you have 0 subscribers or 10,000. I want to read your work. Drop your Substack below. I will read as many as I can and subscribe to those that resonate. I will support the voices that need to be heard. And if a writer speaks to your soul, lift them up. Share their work. Pass it on. Your voice matters. Your words have power. Let's grow and rise together. post 2: Writers, let's grow together! Great newsletters deserve more eyes. Whether you have 0 or 100K subscribers, drop your Substack below and let people discover your work. See something interesting? Subscribe, share, or comment. Let's support each other! Drop your link & spread the word.

substack post: i'm looking for non-viral substack essays. i keep seeing the same ones on my feed (and they're great!) but i want to read from smaller writers, the ones with fewer likes and views. so many people deserve to be read, but i feel like the algorithm is not vibing with me lately. anyway, drop your latest/favourite piece, and i'll read as many as i can:)

one day maybe i'll write my snarky hyperbolic essay about how substack is three different pyramid schemes in a trench coat, but in the meantime i'll just point out that this is the most tried and true way to get engagement in the app 🥲

teasing you with more from our gift interface but sorry you'll have to stay tuned to open them!!

Have you tried unplugging and plugging yourself back in again? A conversation with David Zvi Kalman

I talked to @dzkalman.bsky.social about our experiences of Shabbat, and why disconnection remains so elusive despite our societal obsession with it.

escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/have-you-t...

three buttons in grammarly's interface: 1) review suggestions, 2) write with generative AI, 3) check for AI text & plagiarism

there’s nothing more telling than the fact that a platform like grammarly is both a tool for creating slop and for detecting it. like, the buttons are quite literally right next to each other.

you’re participating in an arms race against an industry that is already both sides of the arms race

like, if they need to, they’ll tweak their models infinitesimally to reduce the occurrence of em dashes leaving us pointing our fingers at each other.

my take is that if you’re evaluating whether something is AI using methods that are tritely computable — for example, the presence or absence of em dashes — then you are engaging with it on its own terms, rather than human terms, and will lose.

Zines spread on a table

Two students sitting in a zine library. One is holding a zine. One is on a laptop.

Many students holding zines or browsing the stacks of a zine library

A hand holding up a zine called Razorcake with orange splats and a spiderweb. Next to the zine is a laptop displaying a website copy of the zine.

Every semester I take my Escape the Algorithm students at Penn to the local zine library called The Soapbox to talk about radical publishing and expressive design. While we’re there, the students each pick a zine and recreate it as a website.

8 postcards spread out on the table. one has an illustration of the chicago bean, one has a comic, and one reads "Hi, Elan. Did you expect to get one from more than 6,000km away when you typed 'write me a thoughtful postcard?'"

A real embarrassment of riches: postcards from Escape the Algorithm readers turned ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporters!! 🥺🥺🥺