Watching the paper being printed, feeling the rumble of the machines, we became slightly obsessed with the idea of putting all this in a browser, wiring it all up to the internet, making it into another web accessible resource. Of not seeing the web as a way of floating off the physical world, disappearing in a puff of bits but embedding the web in the world, using it to reclaim, reuse and re-appropriate industrial age technologies. We became interested in the idea that we didn’t have to invent new ecosystems for everything that needed doing, that there were all these magnificent infrastructures just lying around, waiting to have new life breathed into them. They were being abandoned by the commercial entities that built them – just as they finally grasped the need to ‘get digital’ – but that didn’t mean they were valueless.
We decided that Newspaper Club’s message to the newspaper business could perhaps be a rallying cry for the internet at large: We Have Broken Your Businesses, Now We Want Your Machines.
