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?

Axiom 1: The doc you are now reading was once vacant

This is true, in a sense, of anything that is published. There is always an empty page, a 0kb file, a blank tape. But a doc is also different, because if writing is a terrain and publishing is a steep cliff, then here the cliffs are ever-present and imminent, almost infinitely easy to fall off of. The share button is always there, trivial to press, a forceful tide pulling the intimate into the public.

Axiom 2: The fact that you are reading this doc is impossible

The doc you are reading was inspired in no small part by a copy of a small-run perfect-bound softcover book, Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: For the Love of Softness by Be Oakley, that I picked up while browsing Yu & Me Books in Lower Manhattan. It was impossible that I found myself in that bookstore in a city in which I do not live, impossible that I would spot the book on a shelf amid a haystack of others, impossible that its minuscule spine would catch my eye, impossible that I would remember to pluck it from my own bookshelf instead of one of the many other unread books next to it, impossible that I read it surreptitiously in the back of a synagogue during the Jewish Day of Atonement, impossible that my brain lingered on the subject of Google Docs months later while I walked my dog long enough to pull the book out of the library of my memory and string it together with my thoughts, to say nothing of the impossibility of the book itself, or the internet, the cloud, distributed server farms, trillion-dollar companies, and the impossibility of an audience.

Axiom 3: To publish is the default position of being human

French philosopher Jacques Derrida has said that even the primordial question of philosophy, "What is being?" is a question, and therefore presupposes an Other that you are asking the question to. Not only is every thought that we have like a voice echoing through a cavernous room, desperate to find someone to hear it, but our very being is contingent on that finding.

Axiom 4: 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.

Axiom 5: A doc is a distinct, shareable object

A doc teaches you how to get into competitive Pokemon. A doc helps you determine whether you are lesbian. A doc exhaustively screenshots and analyzes food in the 2019 TV series Ming Dynasty. A doc walks you through the steps to rip a CD. A doc is a list of galleries representing only white artists. A doc is a room you need to escape. A doc is a recipe book shared between friends. A doc is a log of dose trips. A doc is the salaries of TV writers. A doc tracks the points awarded on every season of Drag Race. A doc chronicles the activities of an internet account called "Dad." A doc indexes the lore of Starset albums. A doc is a syllabus for decentering whiteness in design history. A doc asks what we should do before January. A doc is a love letter to a friendship. A doc is a toolkit for getting through the pandemic. A doc is a map. A doc is a playlist of experimental films and videos. A doc offers ideas for how to teach ceramics making virtually. A doc sends masks to prisons. A doc is email correspondences between My Little Pony characters. A doc is a place to put texts you want to send to your ex. A doc is a list of things to do after prom. A doc is a poetry mixtape.

Axiom 6: The cheaper and easier a publishing tool is to use, the more ripe it is for challenging power hierarchies

A tool that requires more technical literacy, time, or money becomes inherently inaccessible to many with less power, and its form will appropriately and intentionally project class, prestige, and rarity. For that reason, a feature-rich custom website designed and built by a web development agency can only have so much radical potential. A tool that is free, and whose interface is a common word processor immediately understandable by most creators and consumers, will often incorporate fringe ideas and language in a way that these websites do not.

Axiom 7: Some forms of publishing have softer edges than others

A platonic zine is that book made up of collaged scans, unedited handwriting that you print on printer paper at the apartment of the last person you still know with a printer. It's the book you fold tediously one by one, tie shut with a piece of string or a few staples, and hand out to your friends or sell for a few quarters at the local cafe. It's the book that will never make headlines, or a profit, or see the inside of a Barnes & Noble. It's that book, in the words of Oakley, "made without access to anything substantial to produce a work with substance," whose value "does not come from rarity but commonality."

Axiom 8: A doc is like a zine

The only thing that is special about a doc is that there is nothing special about a doc. Take its url:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Se0yHNaN9hwV2LcQXm2HlfTp-sGDeJSwY2sWrA2yg0/edit