On Sunday evening, Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. By Tuesday, a 16-year-old Texan, Kel, had built a one-page website, Justice for Jacob Blake, that offered context, templates for contacting officials, mental-health resources, and donation links.

To build it, Kel turned to Carrd, a simple tool that lets anyone throw together a site in minutes. All it takes is an email address to have a site hosted by Carrd on whatever topic you want. “I don't have much of a platform and was even hesitant to share it at first,” says Kel, who asked not to be identified with her surname to avoid trolls. Carrds give anyone that platform.

Justice for Jacob Blake is just the most recent of the social-justice-related Carrds shared across Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok as one-stop resources in recent months. Such easy-to-use tools are reinventing the basic building block of the internet—the website—for people who want to share resources and information quickly, safely, and creatively. Along with better-known tools like Google Docs, they are forming the bedrock of a new form of “protest internet” for the 2020s.

Carrd was launched in 2016 by founder AJ (who goes by just his initials) to simplify the process of creating web pages. He says it was never meant to be a protest tool—though he isn’t unhappy about how it has been repurposed. He just wanted a “boring” and simple way to throw up a website quickly. “My expectation was more ‘general use,’” AJ says. “I didn’t anticipate any of these other uses. Those were pleasant surprises.”

Carrds were initially used as personal pages and homepages for small businesses touting things like homemade wares or tutoring. Like many recent trends, they found initial popularity among K-pop fans, who created elaborate digital collages of bands. But Carrds quickly proliferated beyond the K-pop set, initially into niches like Harry Potter fan fic, fantasy, and LGBTQ communities.

Then George Floyd was murdered. AJ remembers the exact moment when Carrd exploded. On May 30, he got an automated notification that his server was about overloaded. It didn’t make sense. “I didn’t realize what was happening,” he says.

Blessed by the queen

Turns out that the queen of virality herself, Kim Kardashian West, had tweeted out a link to a Carrd that listed resources for the Black Lives Matter movement. It was the beginning of a fundamental change in how Carrds were used: they were embedded in Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter bios by users looking to push forward social change.

Source: MIT Technology Review

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