Absent started as a selfish mechanism to learn more with less effort. The tech cycle moves too fast, and passive reading leads to zero retention. I needed a system to force me to engage with the world, process the noise, and distill it into something I could actually remember.

I built this to curate my own news feeds away from social media. I wanted a macro-view of what’s going on as objectively as possible, pulling from sources across the spectrum. The next natural step was to share it. While the curation isn’t highly individualised right now, it will eventually move into the niches between the niches, surfacing the exact news I would have otherwise missed. And if I can share that, why not?

Why the snail? Because I love them. They are delicate little nomads that carry their homes with them, moving slowly and steadily to tend to their environment. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I could wax poetic about them, the hype cycle, and the juxtaposition of it all. But really, I just like snails.

Algorithms run at a million miles an hour, and the news cycle is unending. This system helps me stay informed without being overwhelmed, and I wanted to open it up for anyone who feels the same.

— Absent