Just wanted to put down some thoughts around Rubberslug.com now that it might be gone for good.

Life on the early internet was one of unbounded promise; for the first time, it was easier than ever to find comminutes of people that shared your values outside of your hometown. If the communitiy or spaces that you wanted to see didn’t exist, it was up to you to create and manage it.

Rubberslug was one of those places. It was created by an enthusiatic cel collector with the skills to create a platform for other cel collectors to post & maintain their own collections. From my understanding, it ran on a box in this collector’s house since the time it was built. It was such an amazing resource in the early 2000’s; to be able to easily see what folks were collecting & just see amazing examples of the animation production artwork that came out of studios all over the world. It connected people with a very specific niche hobby with each other directly in the platform. There had been other forums or digital spaces where this community would gather, but Rubberslug was the only one that was tailor made for them and image forward in a way that the hobby needs.

Rubberlug wasn’t created to generate revenue.

I am stuggling to think of a platform created in the last fifteen to maybe 20 years that wasn’t designed to steal and mine peoples’ lives for profit. I hate that so much of our lives and the way that we connect with other humans is deemed ‘content’ to make money for some mega corporation or go into the pockets of a single billionare. Frankly, this is an expectation these days.

We serve up the maps of our lives, charted in photos and messages to friends & loved ones, sacrifce our privacy, history in service of making the rich richer. We no longer own our own cartography, image, our very voices; it can be erased easily & often is by opaque algorithims deciding whether or not our digital existance is allowed to persist.

I really mourn the loss of Rubberslug. It was a bastion of what the Internet was supposed to be (and was, for a while), the hope that came with endless possibilities to create the change you wanted to see in the world. It was the perfect thing for a specific point in my life; I am so glad to have been part of it and that it existed at all.

Being able to own and manage this little site (with varying degrees of success, apologies), I hope, supports the legacy of Rubberslug and how it allowed me to dream.