I want to tell you about the most punk technology on the internet, and it isn't blockchain or Tor or end-to-end encryption. It is RSS. Really Simple Syndication. A technology from 1999 that nobody talks about, that has no venture capital behind it, that generates no revenue for anyone, and that quietly, stubbornly, continues to do exactly what it was designed to do: deliver content from publishers to readers without any intermediary deciding what you should see.
In an era when every piece of content you consume is filtered, ranked, optimised, and monetised by platforms that profit from your attention, RSS is an act of rebellion. It says: I'll decide what I read. I'll choose my sources. I'll see everything they publish, in the order they publish it, with no algorithm telling me what's important and no advertiser paying to interrupt me. In a world designed to steal your attention, RSS is the technology that gives it back.
What RSS actually is
For those who have never used it - and that's most people, which is part of the problem - RSS is beautifully simple. A website publishes an RSS feed, which is just a structured list of its content. You subscribe to that feed using a reader app. When the site publishes something new, it appears in your reader. That is it. No account to create on the publisher's platform. No notifications to manage. No algorithm deciding whether you see it. You subscribed, so you see it. Every time.
CultureTerminal, one of the products I built, runs entirely on RSS. It pulls content from dozens of feeds across advertising, design, fashion, media, and culture, and presents them in a single interface. The technology that powers a significant chunk of my most sophisticated product is a protocol from the Clinton administration. And it works perfectly. Reliably. Every single day. Without asking anyone for permission or paying anyone a fee.
Why nobody uses it
The obvious question is: if RSS is so good, why does almost nobody use it? The answer is that RSS has no business model, and in the modern internet, technologies without business models get marginalised. Nobody profits from you using RSS. Google killed Google Reader in 2013 - the most popular RSS reader in the world - because it didn't generate ad revenue and it actively competed with their business model of being the intermediary between publishers and readers. Social media platforms had every incentive to replace RSS with their own feeds, where they could insert ads and control what you see. And they succeeded.
The death of Google Reader is one of the most underappreciated moments in internet history. It was the moment when the open, decentralised, user-controlled internet lost to the platform-controlled, ad-supported, algorithmically-mediated internet. Not with a dramatic battle, but with a quiet discontinuation notice. Google killed the open web's best reading tool because it wasn't profitable, and nobody with the power to stop it cared enough to try.
The other reason nobody uses RSS is that it requires intention. You have to choose your sources. You have to curate your own feed. There's no discovery algorithm bringing you things you might like. If you don't subscribe, you don't see it. This is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The feed only contains what you chose, which means it only contains things you care about. But it also means you have to do the work of finding those things, and most people would rather let an algorithm do that work for them.
The case for choosing control
Here's why I think choosing control matters, and why RSS isn't just nostalgic but necessary. When an algorithm decides what you see, it optimises for engagement. Engagement, in practice, means emotion. The content that gets surfaced is the content that provokes the strongest reaction - outrage, fear, delight, envy. This isn't a conspiracy. It is just maths. The algorithm does what it's trained to do, and it's trained to maximise the time you spend on the platform.
The result is a diet of information that's the equivalent of eating only sugar. It's satisfying in the moment but terrible over time. You end up anxious, misinformed, and addicted to the very thing that's making you feel that way. RSS is the salad. It isn't as immediately exciting, but it's what your mind actually needs: a calm, chronological, unmanipulated flow of content from sources you chose because you trust them.
I notice the difference in my own thinking. When I spend a morning on Twitter/X, I end the morning feeling agitated and informed about things that don't matter. When I spend a morning reading my RSS feeds, I end the morning feeling calm and informed about things I actually care about. Same amount of time. Completely different effect. The medium is the message, and the medium of RSS is: you're in charge.
RSS as infrastructure
Beyond the philosophical argument, RSS is also extraordinary infrastructure. Four of my sites run on daily automated pipelines that pull content via RSS, process it, and deploy updated pages every morning. CultureTerminal, EVERYWEAR, Little London, the London Pub Guide - all of them use RSS as a foundational data layer. The feeds are reliable, structured, free, and universally supported. No API key required. No rate limits. No terms of service that change every six months. Just a URL that returns XML, the same way it has for twenty-five years.
There's something beautiful about building on technology that old and that stable. In an industry obsessed with the new, RSS is a reminder that sometimes the old thing is the right thing. It doesn't need to be disrupted. It doesn't need a token. It doesn't need AI. It needs to keep doing exactly what it does, which is deliver content from point A to point B without anyone in the middle taking a cut or making a decision.
The quiet rebellion
I called RSS punk, and I mean it. Not punk in the aesthetic sense - there's nothing visually rebellious about an RSS reader. Punk in the ideological sense. Punk said: we don't need the music industry to make music. RSS says: we don't need platforms to read content. Punk said: do it yourself. RSS says: curate it yourself. Punk was made by people who were tired of being told what to listen to by record labels. RSS is for people who are tired of being told what to read by algorithms.
The rebellion is quiet because RSS doesn't advertise itself. There's no RSS marketing team. There's no RSS conference. There's no RSS thought leader with a newsletter about the future of RSS. It just exists, like plumbing, doing its job in the background while everyone argues about whether TikTok or Threads or Bluesky is the future of content consumption.
Maybe none of them are. Maybe the future of content consumption looks a lot like the past: you find the sources you trust, you subscribe to their feeds, and you read what they publish. No middleman. No algorithm. No ads. Just words on a screen, chosen by you, for you.
RSS isn't the future because it was never trying to be the future. It's just a good idea, well-implemented, that refuses to die. And in a world of hype cycles and platform collapses and enshittification, there's something deeply reassuring about a technology that has been quietly working since 1999 and will still be quietly working long after the latest social media platform has been acqui-hired into oblivion.
Subscribe to some feeds. Take back your attention. The quiet rebellion is waiting for you.
