👋 New name, new course, and other news

Deep Sea Diving is now Escape the Algorithm

A few pieces of small but exciting news:

The newsletter has a new name

I’m rebranding for two reasons:

1. The original name (Deep Sea Diving) was based on a set of techniques — mapping, diving, researching, transmitting — for finding, curating, and recontextualizing hard to reach parts of the internet. I’ll still be using these methods in order to seed my writing, but I wanted a name that focused more on the why rather than the how. Escape the Algorithm is that name.

2. The original name always required quite a bit of explaining (“is it a newsletter about scuba diving?”). The new one is, I find, more intuitive. Readers seem to have an instinctive reaction to the idea of escaping algorithms; it’s something we all crave.

I’ll be teaching at Penn in the fall

The course is called—you guessed it— Escape the Algorithm. And we’ll be unraveling the ideas explored in this newsletter and designing tools for exploring the web in surprising, more human ways.

If you know someone who is a student at Penn, invite them to register!

And in related news, I’m moving to Philadelphia. If you live in Philly, feel free to give a wave.

I’m now a regular contributing writer to Lens

Lens is a new digital publication focused on the cultural trends driving creators, the business of creativity, and the art of the craft. All that means for you is that I’m being paid for some of my work (🎉) and that I’ll hopefully be writing at a more regular cadence. You’ll receive all of my Lens writing here with just a slight delay, but feel free to follow them as well to read work by other talented writers, including Ryan Broderick, Alice Lemée, Nikhil Sethi, and Matt Klein.

This also means that if you have an idea you’d like to pitch for Escape the Algorithm, I may be able to pay you too. Send pitches to hi@elan.place.

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Last but not least, if you enjoy this newsletter, now would be a great time to share it with a friend who you think would enjoy it!