Credit where due.

undrmnd is set in two typefaces from Mass-Driver, a small independent type foundry. They were chosen for their warmth, their e-ink/public-library quality, and their willingness to be both readable and a little strange.

• MD Lorien Serif. Used for headlines, body copy, and the contemplative voice of the site. Designed by Roman Gornitsky / Mass-Driver.
  Weights used: Book, Book Italic, Regular, Italic, Semibold.
• MD UI Sans-serif. Used for labels, navigation, terminal text, and small-format metadata. Designed by Mass-Driver.
  Weights used: Regular, Medium.

The ambient sound dock in the corner of the site offers two tracks, each meant as a small companion to reading, not as background music.

• 01 Brown — lowpass-filtered Brownian noise. Generated procedurally in the browser using the Web Audio API. White noise is integrated through a feedback equation, then shaped by a 600 Hz lowpass filter to produce that warm, rumbly character. No file is loaded; the sound is composed live, in your tab (thanks, Perplexity).
• 02 Horizons — a slow, generative ambient piece. Composed with ElevenLabs' generative music tools. Licensed for use on this site. Plays as a seamless loop when selected from the dock.
• 03 Dock design inspired by @smallbits. The little pixel-art player in the corner of the site is a tribute to the playful, low-fi UI work coming out of the smallbits community. Implemented from scratch in SVG; spiritual debt acknowledged.

undrmnd is partly an argument against the algorithmic feed, partly a love letter to the public library, and partly an experiment in slow, communal learning. What follows is the reading underneath it — first the writers who shaped the argument, then the peer-reviewed research that became the project's working bibliography. The full, living version is kept in a research notebook.

• 01 Jenny Odell — How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House, 2019. On bioregionalism, attention as a public good, and the case for stepping out of the feed. jennyodell.com
• 02 Cory Doctorow — The “Enshittification” of TikTok and subsequent essays. Wired / Pluralistic, 2023–present. On the lifecycle decay of platforms and the case for user-owned infrastructure. pluralistic.net
• 03 Tristan Harris & the Center for Humane Technology — talks and writing on attention design. The framing of “digital anhedonia” in the site copy owes a debt here. humanetech.com
• 04 Robin Sloan — Notes on the home-cooked app and the “web of small computers.” On software made for one community, at one scale, with care. robinsloan.com
• 05 Maggie Appleton — Digital Gardens and writing on tools for thought. On personal knowledge as a slow, evergreen practice rather than a stream. maggieappleton.com
• 06 Ivan Illich — Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality. Harper & Row, 1971–73. On learning webs, public infrastructure for curiosity, and convivial tools that don't consume the user. The deep, quiet ancestor of this whole project.
• 07 Elinor Ostrom — Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press, 1990. The structural reading list for anything calling itself a “commons.”

Thirty-four papers and chapters underpin the thesis. They're grouped here the way they sit in the notebook: the neuroscience and ethics of attention; design that addicts and design that heals; what citizen science and open educational resources can teach a small library; and the politics of learning in public.

• 08 Sharpe, B. T. & Spooner, R. A. — Dopamine-scrolling: a modern public health challenge requiring urgent attention.
• 09 Satani, A., Satani, K. K., Barodia, P. & Joshi, H. — Modern Day High: The Neurocognitive Impact of Social Media Usage.
• 10 Lakhan, S. E. — Hijacked by the Feed: Social Media Neuroengineering-Induced Digital Anhedonia.
• 11 Aitken, A., Rahimpour Jounghani, A. et al. — Naturalistic fNIRS assessment reveals decline in executive function and altered prefrontal activation following social media use.
• 12 Balcıoğlu, Y. S., Bayraktar, Ü. & Güven, E. — The Scrolling Paradox: Analyzing Instagram Addiction Patterns in the Digital Age.
• 13 Foroughi, B., Griffiths, M. D., Iranmanesh, M. & Salamzadeh, Y. — Associations Between Instagram Addiction, Academic Performance, Social Anxiety, Depression, and Life Satisfaction Among University Students.
• 14 Williams, J. & Cavazos-Rehg, P. — Won't We Know If It's Toxic? A Review of the Impacts of Social Media on Public Health.
• 15 Wu, Vargas et al. — Does mindfulness moderate the association between dimensions of social media engagement and depressive and anxious symptoms.
• 16 Üztemur, Lin, Pakpour et al. — Moderated mediation effect of problematic social media use on social networking site discontinuance. Cureus, vol. 17.

• 17 Saura, J. R., Palacios-Marqués, D. & Iturricha-Fernández, A. — Ethical design in social media: Assessing the main performance measurements of user online behavior modification. Journal of Business Research, vol. 129 (2021), 271–281.
• 18 Esposito, F. & Cathoud Ferreira, T. M. — Addictive Design as an Unfair Commercial Practice: The Case of Hyper-Engaging Dark Patterns.
• 19 Bhargava, V. R. & Velasquez, M. — Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction.
• 20 Abeele, M. V., De Leyn, T., Verlinden, A. et al. — Digital disconnection as a plight or right? A manifesto to re-imagine digital disconnection as a reasonable accommodation.
• 21 Wong, P. H. — Confucian Social Media: An Oxymoron?

• 22 Vaingankar, J. A., van Dam, R. M., Samari, E. et al. — Social Media–Driven Routes to Positive Mental Health Among Youth: Qualitative Enquiry and Concept Mapping Study.
• 23 Andersen, A. I. O., Finserås, T. R., Hjetland, G. J. et al. — Can Social Media Use Be More Health-Promoting? Description and Pilot Evaluation of a School-Based Program to Increase Awareness and Reflection on the Use of Social Media.
• 24 Zhang, C., Mohamad, E., Azlan, A. A. et al. — Social Media and eHealth Literacy Among Older Adults: Systematic Literature Review.
• 25 Coorey, G., Peiris, D., Usherwood, T. et al. — Persuasive design features within a consumer-focused eHealth intervention integrated with the electronic health record.
• 26 Rathnabai, A. S. — Nurturing Mental and Emotional Well-being in the Cyberspace.

• 27 Hajibayova, L. — (Un)theorizing citizen science: Investigation of theories applied to citizen science studies. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2019.
• 28 Cotey, S. R., Dunbar-Wallis, A. K., Golumbic, Y. N. et al. — Online citizen science in higher education courses. Ecosphere, 2025.
• 29 Golumbic, Y. N., Baram-Tsabari, A. & Koichu, B. — Engagement and Communication Features of Scientifically Successful Citizen Science Projects.
• 30 Batsaikhan, A., Kurtz, W. & Hachinger, S. — Web Technologies to Support Scientific Research and Education in Citizen Science — A Case Study in Germany.
• 31 Martin, V. — Citizens as Scientists: What Influences Public Contributions to Marine Research?
• 32 Weingart, P., Joubert, M. & Connoway, K. — Public engagement with science — Origins, motives and impact in academic literature and science policy.
• 33 Árnason, V. — Scientific citizenship in a democratic society. 2012.
• 34 Maciuk, K., Apollo, M., Skorupa, J. et al. — Facebook Is “For Old People” — So Why Are We Still Studying It the Most? A Critical Look at Social Media in Science.

• 35 Scanlon, E. — Open educational resources in support of science learning: tools for inquiry and observation.
• 36 Trowler, V. — Negotiating Contestations and Chaotic Conceptions: Engaging [Student Engagement]. Higher Education Quarterly, 2015.
• 37 Mulvey, K. L., Cerda-Smith, J., Joy, A. & Ozturk, E. — A Latent Class Analysis Predicting STEM Career Interest and Perceptions of Barriers. Social Development, 2025.
• 38 Macedo, D. & Mark, I. — Supporting Success: Qualitative Study of Mentoring CASC Candidates Through Structured Exam Preparation.
• 39 Dealtry, R. — When e-learning is not enough — The design and management of an organisation's lifelong learning curriculum.
• 40 Benavot, A., Odora Hoppers, C., Stepanek Lockhart, A. & Hinzen, H. — Reimagining adult education and lifelong learning for all: Historical and critical perspectives.
• 41 Suomi, K., Kuoppakangas, P., Stenvall, J., Pekkola, E. & Kivistö, J. — Revisiting ‘the shotgun wedding of industry and academia’ — empirical evidence from Finland.

Citations are abbreviated for legibility. Some bibliographic records—with DOIs, full author lists, and reading notes—live in the working notebook. If a paper here is yours and you'd like it linked or corrected, write to err698@g.harvard.edu.

The site is built as a small static page (well, this makes two). A few files, a folder of fonts, one audio file, deployed to GitHub Pages at undrmnd.com.

• · HTML, CSS, vanilla JavaScript. No framework. The fog-of-war map and ambient dot field are hand-written canvas. The brown noise is hand-written Web Audio. Everything renders in a single round-trip.
• · Hosted on GitHub Pages. Source lives at github.com/eremmele/undrmnd-site. The companion iOS app is being developed openly at github.com/eremmele/undrmnd.
• · Everything is free. For you, at least.

undrmnd began as a capstone project with Harvard's Master of Liberal Arts in Digital Media Design program at the (HES), developed through DGMD E-599: Capstone Design Studio.

Particular thanks to the faculty and peers of DGMD E-599 — whose critique, patience, and counter-questions made the project sharper, slower, and more honest than it would have been alone. The work is better because of y'all.

• Harvard Extension SchoolInstitutional home
• DGMD E-599 facultyCapstone Design Studio
• DGMD E-599 cohortPeer reviewers & critics
• The wider HES Digital Media Design communityFor years of company
• The Mass-Driver foundryFor the typefaces
• The @smallbits communityFor the dock's spirit
• Mentors, readers, and early testersNamed privately, thanked publicly
• Everyone who has ever loaned me a library cardIncluding the New York Public Library

If you contributed and don't see your name, the omission is mine and not on purpose. Write to me and I'll fix it.