Model View Culture Is Closing Down

After running Model View Culture for three years, I’m writing our community to share that I am shutting down the publication. We will not be offering any further subscriptions or publishing any new content. All of our existing content will remain free and online on modelviewculture.com, and we’ll be working with authors whose pieces were published exclusively in our Quarterly issues to ensure their content is archived online as well. Digital copies of our past Quarterly editions will remain available for purchase here. I’ll continue to be involved in Fund Club, our joint community funding project with AlterConf, and it will operate as it has.

I could use this announcement to offer a searing critique of the tech community’s inability or refusal to support radical, diverse writing, and it would be true: I have faced three years of publishing under non-stop harassment, corporate consumption without compensation, erasure and plagiarism, and the meager and punishing budget that the technology industry has afforded us. But Model View Culture as a body of work is that critique, and it speaks for itself; thus, none need be offered here.

Many people don’t realize that Model View Culture is just me: there’s no team, no staff. And although Model View Culture remains financially sustainable in its current form, I’m ready to move on. While this announcement is bittersweet for me, I am very much at peace with my decision, and excited to pursue other media, publishing and activist projects. Last year, I quietly began working on a book that aims to show, through political analysis and personal stories, the corruption, rot and evil of the tech industry empire. I’m 50,000 words in, and I will be spending most of this year working on that. It will be independently published in print and digital in late 2017/early 2018. You can pre-order a copy here, and I’ll keep you up-to-date on my progress. I also look forward to investing more time and emotional energy into my friends, family and partners.

Maybe I should feel more sad, more angry or more torn-up. Really though, I just feel incredibly proud of the work we’ve done, and incredibly thankful to every person who has read our work, bought a subscription or sponsored an issue. I want to particularly thank the over 300 contributors who have contributed nearly 500 articles to Model View Culture in its three years. Your brilliance, bravery, vulnerability and relentless honesty has changed the industry. Thanks to you, we’ve published the most comprehensive body of tech critique in history against enormous odds, and every article that we’ve ever released remains vitally relevant, perhaps even more than the day it was published in the current political climate. Working with all of you has been the rewarding experience of my life. Please stay in touch and keep fighting.

I’m sure that the many who have rooted publicly or privately for Model View Culture to fail, and for me to fail, will count this as some kind of victory. But the real victory is mine: I’m more proud than I could have ever imagined of Model View Culture. With the experience, knowledge and discipline I’ve built here, I’m ready to pursue a life-long dream of writing full-time. I encourage all of our readers and community to see this as I do: a triumph. It is also a call for more independent, radical social justice tech critique. There is an urgent need for so many more publications, projects and platforms to continue this work. If this is something you’re working on, please feel welcome to reach out to me anytime for all the advice, help and support I have capacity to give. My dream is for a vibrant media that continues to bring Model View Culture’s values of social justice, diversity and resistance to the technology industry.

Thank you for contributing to this vision, and for the honor of my place in it.

Shanley