Foreword

Dear reader,

I quit within the three-month trial period. On paper, it was the perfect job, the culmination of five years in business school, majoring in innovation and business development. Probably, it was the ideal job. In the following decade, the company would grow from a five-person office to a global team of a hundred innovation consultants charging Fortune 500 companies money for translating emerging technologies into revenue. During the same period, I would float around, from country to country, project to project, never setting down roots for longer than two years. Financially, I’d surely have been better off staying with the consultancy company. I’d also have a rehearsed elevator pitch, a clear way to explain my purpose, which I could use when asked about my work by family, friends, and strangers. But I wouldn’t have started Naive Yearly.

Naive Yearly was seeded during my exit interview. We were sitting outside drinking a beer in the mild midday sun. In the feedback session, I was told I was naive; I did not keep up the professional attitude towards clients. The mood was friendly. I agreed with the assessment. I was naive then, but I was not willing to change. I wanted to engage intuitively with other people, clients or otherwise.

Being naive became an emblem for me. I bought a notebook and started to write down thoughts on how to do business in a naive way. I also started a newsletter. I called it Naive Weekly and sent ten editions. That’s roughly three months. I wasn’t mature/focused/brave enough to nurture it. The notebook’s faith was similar. I kept writing in it for a few months, then it ended up in a moving box somewhere between countries, half-empty, until, three years later, I registered my sole-proprietorship business as Naive Studio.

Nearly a decade later, I found myself working on the second year of Naive Yearly, a conference I started to create room for the web I love. In one of the speaker preparation calls, Daniel Murray asked me who would be in the audience. He didn’t mean specific names, but more in terms of their broader backgrounds. Were they designers? Developers? He wanted to shape his talk to the participants. It was a fair question, but I failed to answer with the same simplicity as it was asked. I could have said that yes, the audience is mainly developers and designers. But instead, I started to talk about Naive Yearly as a horizontal gathering. A gathering that brings people together across disciplines to celebrate the web as a medium and material in a language that breaks the siloed lingo of each profession. A shared room for designers, developers, educators, curators, founders, artists, organizers, architects, writers, and consultants. An alternative to the craft-centric conferences about either design or code but also an alternative to the startup and social science conferences, characterized by exponential optimism and critical realism, respectively. A conference that is intimate, familiar, small. Personal enough that, although I struggled to tell Daniel the audience's broader personas, I could have told him their names.

You have Emily and Josh, who participated in the first conference in Copenhagen and made the second edition possible through Hypertext.foundation. There is also Meg, the Are.na editor who again this year worked closely with all the speakers to adapt their talks into the essays you’ll find in this collection. There is also Ana, Elliott, Laurel, Ben, Charmaine, Sarper, Thomas, Daniele, Lukas, Morgan, Maximilian, Kagan, Kalo, and Reuben, who are the remaining people who have been at both editions of Naive Yearly. Not to mention the hundreds who showed up either in Copenhagen or Slovenia and everyone who connected with the project from afar.

Despite the horizontal focus of Naive Yearly, the people who join share something in common. Many are in transition. They are between jobs, cities, relationships, platforms, contexts, disciplines, identities, and ages. They are the kind of people who keep searching for answers. The nomads to whom home is less of a noun and more of a verb. The people who went online to connect with people, ideas, and curiosities outside of their immediate environment and social circles. Often, they are idealists, believing in the importance of keeping the internet flame alive. They want to contribute to the commons and make things available for others to evolve and adapt further. They oppose the stories proclaiming the internet dead or those reducing it to social media. They are looking to articulate their fascination with the internet without blind naivete and for answers in their transitions. The most common feedback I receive from the participants is that they have found their people.

I think most leave without answers. For me, that’s okay. Not all who wander are lost. Sometimes, all you need is to know that you are not the only one searching for a different way of being. A different environment to bloom. Maybe one that doesn’t yet exist. One that requires a new language to be spoken. That’s why I ask the speakers to linger on questions rather than answers, to withhold from easy conclusions, and instead unfold their idiosyncrasies and the mesh of relations, obsessions, and desires that make them who they are. What do they find beautiful? Who do they care for? Why do they devote a big part of their lives to the web? What don’t they know? I believe this ambiguity adds richness to the conversation about the internet, which is often cursed by scale and its cousins, concept and abstraction — favoring projects that confidently wield billions of dollars and users, and overlooking the uncertain and naive.

On the day of the conference, I took the public bus to the venue of Naive Yearly, the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), hosted inside the Fužine Castle, a renaissance castle in the outskirts of Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. It didn’t fail to touch me that in Danish, my mother tongue, m.a.o. is an abbreviation of med andre ord, meaning in other words. If anything, that’s what I’m searching for: other words to talk about the internet. Something that would allow for the internet to look, sound, and feel different. A different aesthetic expression. Maybe something less saturated and pixelated? Something like the silent play of light in an analog photograph.

For most of the route to MAO, I shared the bus with teenagers on their way to high school, but when the bus reached the final stop, I was the only one getting off. A soft cushion of mist sat over the green, dew-covered field. It prompted me to open Naive Yearly by reflecting on my fascination with mist. I’m attracted to how it removes differences and stimulates noticing other aspects like silhouette and motion, and how it births imagination. Mist is like a temporary illusion. What else than mist can effortlessly turn a tree into a human and vice-versa? It's like my half-started projects. A possibility. Another way of being. When the spell is broken, the illusion disappears, but sometimes, something inside me has changed, and I’ll look differently at the world. 

At this point, I’ve closed Naive Studio, my sole-proprietorship business, but Naive Weekly and Yearly thrive. I believe this is because both of these projects live beyond me. They have taken root in others. My greatest wish with publishing these adapted talks from Naive Yearly in their diverse and expanding forms is for their ideas to be spellbinding to you, for them to become the subject of your fascination, if even just temporarily. Ideas can become projects. Some projects become talks. Those talks given at Naive Yearly in the late summer of 2024 have become essays. What will happen from here? That’s partly up to you. 

With care, Kristoffer