Speed is the default assumption of the web.
Faster page loads. Instant responses. Real-time everything. The latency bar goes lower every year, and the expectation that anything you send should arrive immediately has become so ingrained that a two-second delay feels like failure.
We'd like to argue against this. Not against fast infrastructure — we're not Luddites — but against the assumption that speed is always the right goal.
There are things that benefit from slowness.
Letters. The kind you write knowing that the person won't read them for several days. The writing is different when there's a gap between sending and receiving. You can't clarify in real time. You can't take it back with a follow-up message. What you send has to stand on its own.
This changes what you write. Not just the tone — the substance. You think harder before sending. You include what matters and leave out what doesn't. You write something that's meant to last the journey.
Email destroyed this. Not because email is bad — but because email made the gap optional, and then social expectation made the gap feel like rudeness. Responding to an email in two days is now a transgression. Responding to a message in two minutes is standard.
The gap disappeared. And with it, something about the correspondence.
The World's Slowest Chat is tinythings.fun's small experiment in restoring the gap.
Each message takes 24 hours to arrive. You type something today. Someone receives it tomorrow. They reply — and you receive it the day after.
The conversations that happen in Slow Chat are different from normal chat conversations. Not because the people are different, but because the format changes the stakes. When you know you have to wait a day to respond, you don't fire off something reactive. When you know the other person has waited a day for your message, you don't send something throwaway.
The 24-hour delay is load-bearing. Remove it, and you have a slightly inconvenient chat app. Keep it, and something else happens: conversation becomes correspondence.
The Forgetting Machine operates on a similar premise — but in the other direction.
Where Slow Chat asks you to wait before receiving, The Forgetting Machine asks you to release. You write what you want to let go of, and it's destroyed. Not archived. Not stored "securely." Destroyed.
The assumption it argues against is that preservation is always better than loss.
The web is extraordinarily good at keeping things. Every message you've ever sent, the photos from 2009, the comment thread that should have disappeared — the web keeps all of it, forever, by default. Forgetting requires effort. Deletion has to be chosen, and even then, the backups remain.
The Forgetting Machine is one place on the web that deliberately forgets. Not as a technical limitation, but as a design choice. Some things are better released than preserved.
The through-line, across these experiments, is a question about the default settings of the internet.
Speed is a default. Permanence is a default. Constant availability is a default. We've inherited these defaults from the technical priorities of the early web, and we've built social expectations around them, and now the defaults feel natural — even inevitable.
They're not inevitable. They're choices.
We're not suggesting that the whole internet should slow down. We're not arguing for deliberate friction everywhere. Most of the time, fast and permanent and always-on is exactly right.
But sometimes — for some conversations, some messages, some things you're carrying around — the alternative is worth trying.
A message that takes a day to arrive. A thing that gets destroyed when you let it go. Small experiments in what the internet could be if we chose different defaults.