The algorithm you can read. The feed that ends.
“One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one’s Times became to one’s peers’.”
— Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
“The only criterion for a news item… was that it still had to seem interesting.”
— Neal Stephenson, Anathem
The Manifesto: Aperture & Artifacts
We are drowning in infinite streams. Social media, news aggregators, and “For You” pages are designed to be bottomless black boxes. They optimize for engagement—often meaning rage or addiction—and hide their logic.
Fishwrap is the “Anti-Feed.”
It is a “Glass-Box” briefing engine designed for the Diamond Age of information. It is built on radical ideas:
1. Finiteness is a Status Symbol
In a world of cheap, infinite content, the ultimate luxury is an ending. Like the bespoke Times delivered to the elite in Stephenson’s Neo-Victorian future, a newspaper should be an Artifact—a discrete object with a beginning, a middle, and a last page. Fishwrap transforms the chaos of the web into a finite HTML or PDF edition that you can read, finish, and put away. The peasants scroll; the elite read.
2. The Glass Box (Transparency)
Most feeds are black boxes. Fishwrap is a Glass Box. The value of transparency isn’t that you will tune the algorithm every day, but that you can. Trust comes from the option to verify. Our scoring logic is a clear, simple Python script (scoring.py) that you can audit, edit, and control. You are the Editor-in-Chief.
3. The Aperture of Time
In Anathem, the intellectuals filtered information through time to separate signal from noise. We don’t just aggregate; we condense. A single daily edition. We publish once per planetary rotation, prioritizing clarity over speed.
4. The Anxiety of the “Thumbs Down”
In the Black Box Era (Google News, TikTok), feedback is a trap.
- The Dilemma: You see a fluff piece about a politician playing golf. If you click “Dislike,” the algorithm might hide all news about that politician—even the important policy updates. If you do nothing, you get more golf.
- The Result: Users live in fear of their own feeds. They “doomscroll” passively because active curation feels dangerous and unpredictable.
- The Solution: Granular Consent. We don’t ask for a “Thumbs Down.” We ask for an Editor’s Note: “Penalty: ‘Golf’ (-20). Boost: ‘Executive Order’ (+20).” You see the rule. You can delete it. You have agency.
See it Live
The flagship implementation of Fishwrap is The Daily Clamour.
It runs on a strict schedule, publishing a finite edition once per day, every day at 04:00 AM Pacific.
Try Fishwrap
Experience the “Anti-Feed” for yourself. Visit our Demos page to see live examples and get quick-start instructions to run your own edition.