The Problem with Templates
How We Industrialized the Internet and What We Can Do Next
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.”
—Wendell Berry
I Didn’t Understand…
I was consulting a friend on a new venture. The goal was to make schools more human centered. He kept saying he wanted his website to feel more like a labyrinth, a place where people could “get lost.”
“It doesn’t really work that way,” I would say. “In fact, that’s pretty much the opposite of what you want people to do when they visit your website.”People are supposed to navigate through a site quickly and easily, I thought. Everything should be designed strategically to get people to respond to a call to action, to make whatever decision you want them to in the smallest amount of time possible with the fewest steps.
He kept bringing up words and phrases like “trellis” and “meander” and “deep dive.” Such thinking came naturally to him. To me it sounded like chaos.
After about the third round of back-and-forth discussions with me gently pushing back against his wild notions of a digital space where potential customers could “get lost,” he sent me an essay by a designer named Maggie Appleton called “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.”
In it, she casts a vision for a different kind of internet, one that truly resembles the labyrinth my friend was imagining. She invited people to view the internet landscape as a garden—less of a collection of hypercurated individual brands and more of a rolling landscape tended and nurtured by farmers who cultivated paths for people to choose their own adventure. We’ve seen this kind of topography before, in the architecture of wiki networks and personal home pages built before the invention of what we now call blogging.
That One Time We Industrialized the Internet
Appleton argues that the advent of templating software in the early 2000s, specifically Moveable Type, eventually gave way to blog templates like WordPress and Squarespace. Among other factors, this shift contributed to a more streamlined and homogenous internet. To me, this transition serves as a kind of artifact, a historical turning point where a medium began dictating the message. It turned the web from a landscape guarded by coders (early digital farmers and craftspeople with knowledge of how to build) into a place where more individuals could plant their flag without such knowledge and care. The barrier to entry was lowered significantly.
Now, anyone, whether they were practicing creativity or not, could present the appearance of creativity simply by following a template. Thus began the great template-ization of things. Essentially, it turned the internet from a co-op gardening society to an individual industrial one. Where people once organically seeded new ideas, coding and cultivating ecosystems in community, others began performing and manufacturing micro-iterations of the same pattern. Items became cheaper and more streamlined to allow for mass production. Manual practices became automated, templatized, and homogenous. Linguistically, “creative expression” was downgraded to “content.” Words became pictures, which became emojis.
As the influence and popularity of the internet grew and its governing powers (e.g., Google) became stronger, marketers discovered that call-to-action buttons should go here instead of there; that orange was the color clicked on most; that content should be organized this way instead of that way in order to be truly optimized; a photo should be cropped like so; one needs to do such-and-such for thoughts and opinions to be shared and “liked”; and so on.
It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way.
Back to Maggie and her essay. She urges us to consider what we produce on the web less as a performance and more like the practice of “learning in public.” The metaphor she uses is that of tending a community garden—growing, pruning, curating, and experimenting with new ideas, harvesting the good ones and sharing the bounty, iterating on the bad ones without scuttling them out of embarrassment, all while constantly cross-pollinating, connecting ideas with each other through hyperlinks and hat tips. Writing to an audience immersed in hero’s-journey thinking, she was quick to point out the now foreign nature of such an appeal:
This isn’t how we usually think about writing on the web. Over the last decade, we’ve moved away from casual live journal [sic] entries and formalised our writing into articles and essays. These are carefully crafted, edited, revised, and published with a timestamp. When it’s done, it’s done. We act like tiny magazines, sending our writing off to the printer. This is odd considering editability is one of the main selling points of the web. Gardens lean into this—there is no “final version” on a garden. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion.”
The mere act of reading Maggie’s article, created on her own digital garden, sent me off wandering through a number of branching hyperlinks. I was “getting lost.” Not only was it enlightening; I realized, for the first time in a long time, I was having fun on the internet! Not the passive, “scrolling and occasionally chuckling at cat videos” kind of fun. This was active, hippocampus-stimulating, contemplative fun, the kind one might feel exploring in the woods and being surprised by a stream or a wild buck in the distance.
Since AI, the metaverse, and the great template-ization of things show no sign of slowing its growth, I wonder if Maggie’s essay isn’t a directive for how we should instruct a generation to populate it.
What we all love about gardens, whether they yield produce or pixels, is their penchant for iteration. Looking at the web through the lens of a digital garden invites us to iterate our thoughts in concert with other ordinary human beings around the planet. One rarely plants a few seeds and has a garden spring up perfectly on their first try. It’s a constant dance between sunlight, soil, conniving varmints, and the chance of rain.
We Can Make Things That Change Things.
To imagine this ever-expanding virtual landscape as a garden is to imagine a place where our collective journey sees us all planting and nurturing ideas together without fear of being seen as frauds, and instead adopting the spirit of a farmer. It’s a bold decision to stand in the middle of what’s become a minefield and exclaim our ordinariness out loud, revel in our lack of expertise, and delight whenever we discover we were wrong about something, then rush to share in the bounty of those insights rather than weeding out our past mistakes.
In fact, some farmers will tell you it’s actually beneficial to keep certain weeds in your garden. Some have a way of warding off bugs who are interested in devouring your harvest.
The idea of creating, iterating, liberating, and, perhaps most importantly, exposing that kind of process openly with others rather than deleting or burying it can seem like a vulnerable leap, but it’s the kind of communal adventure that carries with it the power to till and establish the twenty-first-century landscape we actually hope for.
To do that, we first have to break the template.
In the current landscape we are livestock staring at our feed.
In a digital garden we are creators, explorers, shepherds, and stewards.
Industrialization, automation, and technological templates can be wonderful tools, but only when they make something more cumbersome easier. It is not cumbersome to imagine. It’s not monotonous to explore. These are the gifts of God for the people of God, the merciful harvest of being an ordinary human.
If we teach our children that imagination, iteration, and transformation are not only permissible—in fact, they are some of our highest values—rather than presenting them with a technological factory where everything said is presented as real (“crafted, edited, revised, and published with a timestamp”), we might help curb the slippery notion that people themselves are sums to be rated on a scale, subscriptions to be canceled, unable to be reformed or reconciled, incapable of learning, developing, and iterating.
The burden to prove this, dear reader, is on you and me, the literate and aged, the last of the digital immigrants, the ones who contributed to such an industrialized landscape in the first place, decided where to stab our flag, and allowed our next generation to inherit what we built.
Gardens are possible, but first the land needs clearing. Grab a shovel and some fresh seed. There is great work to do.
On the Road…
Thanks for reading Fuseletter Family! This week’s essay is from a chapter in my new book, The Forgotten Art of Being Ordinary, which comes out next month. I’m starting to map out a small book tour. If you’re interested in putting on an event in your city, reply to this email and let’s talk!