Thoughts

Short thoughts, notes, links, and musings by Molly White. RSS

Fighting for our web

We can build the web that we want to see. Watch the recording of my talk from XOXO!

archive spelunking, spooky edition

A vintage postcard featuring multiple figures sitting in a cornfield with jack-o-lanterns on their heads. Several in the center are reading a book titled “Heaven and how to get there”. Text above the image reads “We hope to meet you there.” Text below reads “Is there a heaven for pumpkinheads?”

A postcard with an illustration of a person with a jack-o-lantern head, holding a black cat by its scruff. Text at the top reads “Happy Hallowe’en”; text below reads “Is this your pussy”

smol [citation needed] stickers are in stock, and these ones have white underprinting so they show up better on bright backgrounds!

Molly’s hand holding a bright turquoise notebook, with a transparent sticker featuring the [citation needed] text from Wikipedia. The sticker is 3" x 0.5" (7.6cm x 1.25cm).

https://store.mollywhite.net/

got some sunnier photos of my little friends

A sticker created from an illustration of Mothman, standing behind text that says “Anti Crypto Cryptid Club” in the style of the Anti Social Social Club

An oval, black linocut ink print with a raccoon baring its teeth in the center, and “ignore all previous instructions” written in angular capitals around the border

A lot of Taylor Lorenz’s announcement about going independent resonates so strongly that it’s hard to pick just one paragraph to quote.

I’ve always operated in a weird liminal space, often labeled as an “influencer” or content creator as much as a journalist. And I am, and have always been, both. But the legacy media is not set up for people like me. The truth is that in today's media environment, these distinctions are meaningless. We are all part of the same media ecosystem; we can all have a voice online. These artificial lines were demolished years ago. The journalists I’m most inspired by today are those who have taken their voices back into their own hands— independent content creators who challenge powerful institutions and carve out their own space in a crowded media landscape. By going independent, I hope to do more of what I love: helping people understand the world around them, inspiring them to build a better internet, holding power to account, and honestly, having a lot more fun!! I want to do all of this without worrying about some corporate overlord and without the constraints of institutions that, at times, are more concerned with optics than with challenging power. I want to experiment with new formats in storytelling without navigating a vast corporate bureaucracy. I want to be able to write freely and speak directly to people via Substack, TikTok, YouTube, my podcast, and run my silly meme pages.

And as someone who often gets blasted for having strong opinions on the topic I write about (as though most “crypto media” journalists don’t), I especially have to highlight this:

I also firmly believe that the era of faux neutrality—the “view from nowhere” style of journalism—is over. I will always be upfront and honest about my perspectives and where I’m coming from. Sometimes you might disagree with me, or I might be wrong(!), and I’d rather hear that than pretend I’m not a human being with opinions. This transparency is, to me, the essence of trust in journalism.