The Doc Web

A couple of months ago I wrote ‘Real Things For Real People’, a post about print and other experimental forms of publishing that seem to be emerging. It’s a subject that continues to be on my mind as I think about what’s next for my own print zine, and where we are in the ‘Alms Race‘: The escalating development of product features providing direct financial plumbing (and community) tools to users occurring across the legacy Web2 ecosystem.

What, and how, are we to publish in the enshittified post-social era?

The Doc Web

I recently came across a great essay over at lensmag.xyz called: The Doc Web: The soft power of Google Doc publishing. It’s a weird text exploring the idea that public Google Docs form a unique and often overlooked part of the Internet. Acting as living, low drag web pages.

No one would mistake a word processor for the front page of the internet, not unless their computer is nothing more than a typewriter. A hammer is not a portal, and Google Docs, the word processor of our time, is nothing more than a hammer to the nail of language. Right?

‍Slow down.

The essay consists of ten axioms, highlighting the potential for Google Docs to democratise publishing and foster collaborative, evolving content:

This doc is public, and so are countless others. These public docs are web pages, but only barely — difficult to find, not optimized for shareability, lacking prestige. But they form an impossibly large dark web, a web that is dark not as a result of overt obfuscation but because of a softer approach to publishing. I call this space the “doc web,”

Inspired by the term, I want to tell you about my own experiences publishing online documents on The Doc Web. I hope it’s interesting and useful to other folks wanting to experiment.

Start Select Reset Zine

My first exploration of alternative publishing started with Start Select Reset Zine (SSRZ).
While SSRZ has since evolved into a physical publishing endeavour, Issue #1 – Your Attention Is Sovereign, was a PDF.

Back in 2018 when I started my podcast PermanentlyMoved.Online, short essays read by their writer were uncommon in podcasting. Now, with Substack encouraging writers to read out their essays, the idea is much less novel.

When I first started 301, I was simply posting the audio of the show to my weeknotes, and that was that. However, friends soon encouraged me to post the show’s text to my blog, as they wanted to reference the ideas on a permalink outside of an audio file. This feedback got me thinking about how to experiment with different formats, which led to the creation of my first zine.

Instead of posting each episode as a blog post, I thought it might be cool to collect them by theme and publish them as a PDF. So, in September 2019, I released a collection of scripts and essays from the first season of my podcast, covering topics like the attention economy, social media, and device use.

In the introduction to the zine at the time I wrote:

This PDF series should be taken in a similar vein. Partly an experiment in the world of samizdat publishing. A zeitgeist that is popular in the ‘Dark Forest Internets’ I frequent. But also as a response to my friends that keep urging me too ‘publish more content’.

So five years later, after from publishing a PDF collection online behind a secure link that isn’t indexable by bots, search engines etc – How have things gone?

With nearly 20,000 downloads over five years for a 5,000-word essay collection, I’d say rather well. Certainly enough to make publishers sit up and take notice when I mention these numbers in other contexts. I do wonder how things might have gone if I had charged a quid for it. 🤔 Then again, I likely wouldn’t have received the 100 or so emails from readers who found value in it over the years.

After the first zine went out, I began publishing the episodes as posts on my blog, and the zine evolved into a physical print edition sent to my paid supporters. But my interest in the samizdat spirit of “The Doc Web” remained.

Worldrunning.Guide

That was until early last year. I was messing with another URL in CloudFlare and noticed that nearly 100 people a month were visiting the URL worldrunning.guide and all I was doing was dumping them into an empty Google Doc. Not a good look.

This is when I inadvertently became a new member of ‘The Doc Web’, wholly unaware that there was even a name for it. I decided to use the Worldrunning.Guide Google Doc as a place to collect all ‘worlds’ essays that have appeared on this blog into one location.

This wasn’t just a practical decision; it was an intentional experiment—a low-stakes way of publishing to the internet that didn’t require a website. I also wanted to see how documents travel and how attaching an online text to oneself—much like people did in the late ’90s and early 2000s—would work out.

As of writing this, there are 25.6k words in the Doc, and the preliminary results of my experiment have been positive. I’ve been tagged in dusty Discords I rarely frequent after someone shared a version of the text saved as a PDF. Putting all the worlds essays into one location has possibly been the best “content” decision I’ve ever made.

I accidentally had written a book.

Working in worlds, I meet many people—those in the games industry, immersive theater, XR spatial designers, etc. Over the last year, I’ve been surprised by the number of complete strangers who’ve told me they’ve read the entire document. People have reached out over email after reading it and have got in touch, leading to super high-context conversations right from the start. It’s honestly been better than a business card.

Because it’s a Google Doc, I don’t have any precise metrics to offer on how many people have actually read the whole thing. Then again I don’t know how many people who downloaded Issue #1 of SSRZ read it either. But…

I just had a look at the stats in CloudFlare and after normalising the number of people passing though the URL to the same ratio as confirmed views this blog gets vs URL traffic – Worldrunning.guide I currently getting just over 900 views a month, or about 10k a year. Which isn’t bad at all.

Living Documents on the Web

In the introduction to Worldrunning.Guide, I explicitly state that it’s a living document: “A work in progress. Its contents will change, move, shift, and evolve as my thinking develops.”

This approach was less about setting things in stone and more about creating a space where my work could grow over time. With the help of an intern at Impossible Object Books, I’ve retitled and rearranged the collection order and made several significant editing passes on the writing, improving many of the texts. Some essays are much expanded and ‘better’ than the versions that first appeared on this blog.

The Doc Web allows for the kind of low-stakes experimentation that traditional publishing often stifles. Even web publishing tools like WordPress or Substack can feel too final once you hit “publish.” I wouldn’t dream of doing a major re-write of old posts here on this blog. But the fluidity of a Google Doc – with its inherent capability for real-time updates and edits – feels more aligned with the organic process of thinking.

Editing a text in a Google Doc is just natural, a thing that you do. I think this has something to do with The Doc Web Essay’s 9th Axiom: “a doc always appears as if brand new.“

Over The Shoulder

There’s a certain ‘over-the-shoulder’ quality to working away in a public GoogleDoc thats frequently visited by strangers. In fact it doesn’t matter whether it’s a published page, a team document in google workplace or a notion page they all have this quality.

Several times, while working on Worldrunning.guide I’ve noticed someone—or multiple people—stopping by the document whilst I’ve been in there. It feels a little like working in the window of a shop, rearranging the display while others look in. It’s not intrusive, nor does it feel voyeuristic; it just ‘is’. The nature of the medium.

About a decade ago, I participated in several collaborative writing projects called ‘Book Sprints’. In these sessions, 10-12 people (usually in person) would gather at a coworking space with a plan, and by the end of the day, we would have written a text together in the same document.

This kind of collaborative work—despite the tools being better than ever as shared codespaces—seems to have dropped off in recent years. Perhaps it’s because of a lack of escape velocity, or that content creation has swung back toward individual creators, as the popularity of platforms like Substack suggest. But there was (and is) something amazing about witnessing a group of highly aligned and motivated people drop into a Google Doc and see 20,000 words emerge in the course of an afternoon.

Anyone who has participated in a FigJam knows how fertile the ground is for new forms of group digital experimentation. Over in the group chat, we’ve recently resolved to write the next physical issue of Floating Worlds using this format.

Out of Feed

Social media is now completely unreliable for putting a creative’s work in front of an audience. their audience. Discoverability and consistent engagement with followers and subscribers has completely gone away. But there might be a workaround.

The 4th Axiom in The Doc Web Essay is: If you build a tool with the ability to publish, so help them god, people will publish

They will publish often, zealously, and without regard for the intended purpose of the tool. Yelp reviews will be co-opted to publish blog posts; Venmo payments will be co-opted to publish poems; spreadsheets will be co-opted to publish personal websites; maps will be co-opted to publish magazines. The arc of specialized publishing bends towards generalized publishing.

Several times over the last year, I’ve received DMs from people within hours of updating Worldrunning.Guide, asking what was new. At first, I found this unusual, how did they know? But then I realised something important about publishing to The Doc Web.

1. Google Docs is a business tool and therefor respects the user. It shows them what they want to see.
2. Google Docs defaults it’s homepage to ‘most recently modified’

When you open any google doc, it is automatically added it your ‘docs.google.com’ home feed. This is a kind of ‘subscribe’ mechanism. So whenever I update Worldrunning.Guide the document is placed back to the top of the list – right in the line of sight of the user when they open the page – this is a sort of soft notification (to someone who already has had enough of an interest in the document to open it at least once before) that there’s been an update.

One of the big things about the newsletter boom is that the audience was self selecting to let the writers work into the personal and intimate space of the email Inbox.
For someone who writes a lot and uses Google Docs every single day the recently modified screen feels as private to me as an email inbox.

Every time I update Worldrunning.Guide, it’s nudged back to the top of this list. The nature of this “notification” feels less intrusive, yet more personal and targeted than an email.

I’ve been thinking of this as ‘Out of Feed’ publishing. Using a business tool for social reasons. Bypassing the noisy, crowded world of social media feeds and blog rolls for something more direct.

Since Google Docs is primarily a place of work—used by businesses and professionals—I don’t foresee this functionality disappearing anytime soon. This could become a subtle but powerful method of publishing for people who are looking for an experimental way of keeping in contact with their audience, outside the increasingly unreliable social media algorithms.

Play Spaces

The Doc Web, at least in my social circle, has always been a nascent concept, a space for experimentation and play. 

For instance, I must link to this incredible document from 2015 when graphic designers Michael Oswell and David Rudnick took it upon themselves to rebrand former Serpentine Gallery CTO Ben Vickers in a public Google Doc. This is a really playful example of the kind of creative experimentation that The Doc Web allows for.

For several years, writer Jay Owens kept a public “to-read later” list as a Google Doc—a practice that blurred the line between personal notes and public publishing. Similarly, writer Adam Rothstein was a prolific public document maker, sharing texts like this redacted letter as a form of artistic practice.

These examples, along with many more buried deep in my Google Docs, illustrate the playful and experimental nature of this medium. I would share more, but how public is public? Especially when it comes to decade old documents is not something I’m going to navigate right now.

More recently, Friendly Ambitious Nerd author and Twitter celeb Visakan Veerasamy has become a big proponent of The Doc Web—whether he knows the term or not, I’m not sure. His ‘50 Year Plan,’ a public google doc is a fascinating read that offers an intriguing glimpse into his long-term vision. I think having fully open comments is an usual, but powerful, community building tool. They also provide a kind of social proof ‘people were here before you’ – I may turn them on for wordrunning.guide.

Whether you’re a writer, artist, or thinker, consider using public Google Docs as a space for your next low stakes project. Forget about the polish and finality that comes with blogs and newsletters. Instead, embrace the fluidity and immediacy of The Doc Web.

Share your drafts, your half-formed ideas, your work-in-progress. Open up your creative process to others, and see what emerges from this form?

A Vision for a DocLetter

One of the aspects I love most about The Doc Web is when these spaces feel active and alive. In 2025, I’m envisioning the launch of a collective, shared publishing project on Google Docs—a sort of DocLetter that blurs the lines between a newsletter, a webzine, and a living document at a memorable URL.

Here’s the idea: Once a month. A group of authors and contributors come together for a live writing session, jamming in Google Docs. Maybe we stream the Zoom call on Twitch, allowing viewers to watch the new issue evolve in real-time – perhaps even contributing comments and suggestions in the document.

This would transform the act of writing and publishing into a performance—a shared experience that blends the roles of creator and audience. As well as making the production of each webzine fun.

I don’t yet know what this DocLetter would be about or who would be involved, but I think it’s a cool idea. A dedicated Doc Web outfit that pushes the boundaries of what digital publishing can be. Seems like something Metalabel would be into?

If this idea is something that resonates and you’re interested in being part of this experiment, I’d love to hear from you.

Embracing The Doc Web

In the enshittified post-social era, where do we go from here? Perhaps it’s time to embrace The Doc Web for certain projects. A shift in how we think about publishing in the digital age. It’s a space for experimentation, fluidity, and direct engagement with readers outside the constraints of traditional platforms. I think it’s something worth exploring.

So, the next time you have an idea or a project that doesn’t fit neatly into a blog post or a newsletter, consider the humble Google Doc.

You might be surprised by the possibilities it opens up. I know I have been.

---

If you’ve enjoyed reading The Doc Web consider subscribing to Start Select Reset Zine