I. In the early 2000s, an old friend with a new business wanted me to design his website, but his partner balked: “I can get two websites made in India for half the price,” the partner said. “Sounds like you should do that,” I replied, ending the negotiation. Rude fools were not clients I chose to pursue. The rude, cheap partner was later part of the self-selected posse of suck-ups and hangers-on who advised Elon M*sk on his invasion purchase of Twitter. It was the rude, cheap partner’s idea to strip Twitter users of note of their blue verification badges and sell meaningless blue verification badges to anybody willing to pay $8/month for the privilege. So, no blue verification mark or algorithmic support for the tweets of Stephen King, but blue “verification” and an algorithmic boost for Joey Knuckles, First of His Mother’s Basement. M*sk must have dug the idea, because he implemented it immediately—proving, as if we weren’t already drowning in evidence, that people with bad taste run in packs. The instant my old friend told me his former partner was responsible for the “pay for blue marks that mean nothing” plan, I recalled our abortive design negotiation from years before and was like, Yup, that tracks. At the time of the initial conversation, I believed most people involved in the creation of websites were motivated by altruism, aesthetics, and the desire to create a fairer world. And of course many are. Many, but far from all. I did not see how quickly fascism was infiltrating our trade. Perhaps infiltrating is the wrong word. Perhaps there had always been a Dark Side. II. In the 2010s, I co-founded a traveling web design conference with Eric Meyer, an internationally respected CSS expert, author, and lecturer, and founding member of The Web Standards Project’s CSS Samurai. Together, we crafted a single-track, holistic web design conference peopled by charismatic speakers who had made major contributions to the industry. Our events sold out immediately, without advertising. One night when our event was playing in a U.S. city, we held a party for attendees, and I invited a friend who lived in that town to join as our guest. I had known this man since his early 20s, and watched him grow into an industry-leading design consultant who was just then transitioning his business from a services to a product company. As his plus-one, he brought a young partner. The young partner did not know from Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, any of our speakers, or any of the community projects to which we (including our speakers) devoted so much of our work and time. His first and only words to me were “Who are you?” He didn’t add a popular expletive to the question, but it was implied. As I began to answer his question, I watched his eyes wander. He was clearly scouting for somebody cooler to talk to. So I smiled, stopped talking, and, with a wave, invited him to sample the buffet and drinks. If he’d noticed that I’d stopped talking before finishing, it didn’t bother him. Off he ran. I am still friends with the man I’d invited to the party, although we haven’t spoken for a few years (from lack of opportunity, not lack of interest), and I have watched with happiness over the years as he has moved from success to success. Alas, he is still partners with the punk who came to our party to paint the roses black, and the punk has become even more famous (and more of a cult figure) than my friend. That’s fine, except that the punk has since blossomed into a fascist and racist with money and power; his latest project, although it comes cloaked in tech, is about removing brown people from Europe, I kid you not. I’m not saying every rude and entitled young man in tech grows up to be a fascist, but politeness or lack of it is a signifier, and maybe if you take an instant dislike to someone who acts like a jerk, you should trust that instinct. The post Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

WordPress.com maker Automattic is expanding into education with a new, free product designed for teachers and their classes called WordPress.com Education. The suite for classrooms includes a full WordPress.com domain for each student, plus free domain names (on the .blog or .art domains) and plug-in support. Teachers can provide students with access to the program for free for the first year, without having to put a credit card down or enter a trial. This allows teachers to use the technology in courses that teach students how to build websites, or for other classroom needs such as group projects that incorporate website-building. Unveiling the product at its annual WordCamp US conference on Monday, the company noted that the new Student plan isn’t a stripped-down version of its product. It includes 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, as well as support for plugins, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync. — TechCrunch: WordPress.com targets the next generation of web creators with a free student plan The post For students who make websites appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

STOP ME if you’ve heard this one: The members of an extended family spend years curating a shared online photo album. Then the website they posted on vanishes, flushing their collective memories away forever. Or this: A Queer kid growing up isolated in Nebraska discovers a welcoming community on MySpace; then, one day, MySpace is no more, obliterating that carefully built community—with no chance of recovery. Or an author who’s spent years building a following on Twitter finds their posts there suddenly going unseen after a new owner with a radical political agenda biases the algorithm against their type of content (or even just against them personally, if that new owner is feeling particularly petty and peevish). If you’ve used the internet for more than a few days, you’ve experienced losses like these, along with the frustration and disillusionment that come when our favorite digital walled gardens become more and more about extracting financial value from us while providing less and less actual value to us. The new digital landowner class can also take away our favorite software, or change it in ways to which we never consented. The answer to this destruction of our shared digital commons by a handful of billionaires is the same as it has always been: own your content on the open web (your domain on a server, like mine on this one), and replace proprietary software with open source alternatives. That is the simple message of “Code for the People,” a short documentary film by Bao Nguyen whose July 1, 2026 preview screening I was privileged to attend last night at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo, NYC. As the film’s mini-website explains: We have traded a free internet for a collection of walled gardens. Today, a handful of digital landlords use algorithms to dictate our reality, while closed AI threatens to change the ways we connect. We are at a breaking point: we can either let gatekeepers continue to consolidate their power, or we can reclaim the open source spirit that built the web in the first place. A terrific panel discussion (photo above) followed the film viewing and amplified its themes of digital self-determination in the age of AI and enshittification. Over and over, in different ways, a creatively diverse panel of experts asked us what future we want for the web, and invited us to help create that future. (One of my favorite moments was when Anil Dash laughingly pointed out the irony of closed AI companies, who built their product by stealing the world’s IP without consent, threaten to sue any companies that try to reverse engineer their IP.) “Code for the Future” will stream for free beginning on July 9, 2026. The post The Human Story of the Open Web appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Cameron Cummins-Smith’s grand unifying theory connects the far right’s seemingly disparate obsessions—from trans panic and great replacement theory to anti-feminism and white birth-rate anxiety—into a single ideological system fueled by pornographic narratives: In physics there is this idea of a theory of everything: a single, unified model that can describe all physical phenomena in the universe. Real-world dark matter is part of the development of such a theory. When astrophysicists pointed their telescopes to the stars in the 1970s, they saw things that could not be explained. Either Newton and Einstein were wrong, or there was something they had missed. Dark matter was the proposed explanation: what if there is additional matter acting upon the universe that we simply cannot see? What I propose today is perhaps even more important than a physical theory of everything: a theory that can connect and explain the wide array of right-wing psychosexual neuroses. The theory is that right-wing political narratives are significantly influenced by porn—specifically interracial cuck porn—and conversely the narratives of said porn are significantly influenced by right-wing politics. Pornography is the unseen dark matter molding and shaping how the online right speaks and thinks about politics, on anything from immigration to transgender people to higher education. Call it the interracial cuck porn theory of everything. Read, bookmark, and share: The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything by Cameron Cummins-Smith The post Required reading: “The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything” appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.