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No Thanks, I'll Make My Own

Damlanur Bilgin

"no thanks, I'll make my own" Is a periodical, digital and print hybrid publication that deals with ownership over online spaces. It aims to provide an alternative learning space that embraces not knowing, learning while building and making mistakes along the way.

Each issue of the publication deals a different way of building online spaces as easy as possible, such as building and publishing a simple website with minimal html knowledge and building micro blogging platforms from a guestbook. The difference between most resources and "no thanks, I'll make my own" is the attitude towards the learning process. A lot of tutorials and courses related to online publishing are written in professional context and assume that the reader already has a lot of information. "no thanks, I'll make my own" does the work of finding accessible resources and decoding complicated parts. It encourages a hands on approach and prioritizing self expression rather than technical perfection.

A legislation passed by the Turkish parliament in 2020 requires social networks with more than a million daily users to establish legal entities and store user data in Turkey, which legally forces social networks to comply with government requests of content removal and sharing user information. This law is just one example of a pattern. Governments such as Turkey and large companies such as Amazon alike retaliate against dissenters who speak out on social media. Considering this and the fact that social networks' centralized and large scale structure very often lead to mass harrassment campaigns, it's clear that we need to think of ways we can communicate and share without relying on corporate social media.

This work is released under the Free Art License 1.3


Damlanur is a graphic designer and illustrator from Turkey. She's interested in online culture and design as a practice of chronicling the world around her.

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